SIX WEEKS IN — A LEADERSHIP REFLECTION

By Dr. Claudia Shilumani - Regional Director, IPPF Africa Regional Office

There is a particular kind of humility that comes with stepping into a role you have prepared for and still discovering, in the very first weeks, how much you do not yet know. I arrived as Regional Director of IPPF Africa Regional Office with two decades of experience in health systems and advocacy behind me. I often carry with me frameworks, instincts and ideas. But this time, I arrived, quite deliberately, with my mouth more often closed than open.

Six weeks of listening — in clinics, in community spaces, in crowded meeting rooms and on late-night video calls — have given me something more valuable than a hundred briefing notes ever could. They have given me a picture of a movement that is already in motion. Strong, battle-tested, and refusing to be diminished by the pressures closing in around it.

This reflection is my honest account of what I found.

What I saw in Embakasi changed the way I understand our work

I went to a peri-urban settlement in Embakasi not expecting to be moved. I was moved.

At the REHNET medical centre run by our Associate Member, the Reproductive Health Network Kenya (RHNK), I watched frontline clinical teams provide care to the people most routinely left out of health systems: young mothers navigating impossible choices, LGBTQI+ individuals seeking dignity alongside treatment, sex workers who deserve safety and respect and too rarely receive either. Through RHNK's digital platform, Nena na Binti, young people across Kenya are reaching out daily for trusted, confidential information on contraception, abortion care, HIV testing, gender-based violence, and mental health. Not occasionally. Daily.

What I witnessed was not a gap-filling service. It was a functioning ecosystem built not on donor enthusiasm or policy windows, but on years of quiet, consistent commitment and the kind of community trust you cannot manufacture from the outside.

And it is being built against odds that are getting steeper. Funding is tightening. IPPF's own data shows the Federation has faced over $87.2 million in estimated funding losses, with over 1,300 service delivery points closed across the continent. Anti-rights groups are more organised, better financed, and increasingly fluent in the digital spaces where our communities live. The pressure is not abstract. It is showing up in empty stockrooms and overstretched staff and young people being turned away.

What grounds me is the evidence that the people doing this work are not waiting to be rescued but are adapting, innovating, and holding the line. My job is to stand with them, not in front of them.

Trust is the infrastructure nobody budgets for

In Nairobi, I sat with a group of partners representing a cross-section of Kenya's SRHR ecosystem including researchers, advocates, service providers and youth leaders. It was not a polished stakeholder convening. It was honest. Sometimes uncomfortably so.

What came through clearly was not frustration with the work itself but with how we work together. The fragmentation. The parallel strategies. The information shared selectively rather than generously. The competition for positioning in spaces where collaboration would serve our constituencies far better.

One comment has stayed with me, and it is that trust between organisations, beyond being a soft value is operational infrastructure. Without it, we cannot share intelligence quickly when anti-rights actors move, we cannot coordinate advocacy when a policy window opens, and we cannot hold each other up in the moments of institutional pressure that are coming for all of us.

IPPF's 2025 General Assembly in Bali set a clear direction under the theme Lead with Love, Care with Courage. Our newly adopted Charter of Values built from the voices of MAs across the Federation grounds us in seven commitments: Dignity, Equality, Justice, Pleasure, Community, Integrity, and Resilience. These values are a map for how we should be in relationship with each other and with the communities we serve.

Building that kind of trust, consistently and unglamorously, is the work I am committing to in this region.

African leadership must stop being described as 'emerging'

There is a framing that has followed African SRHR advocates for as long as I can remember. It positions African knowledge, African experience, and African leadership as things in development, promising, perhaps, but not yet fully formed. It shows up in who is invited to speak at global forums, whose research shapes policy frameworks, and whose organisations receive the flexible, long-term funding that makes strategic thinking possible.

I want to name it plainly because I find it exhausting and inaccurate in equal measure.

The organisations I spent time with in these six weeks are not emerging anything. They are fully formed, strategically sophisticated, and sitting on a wealth of lived knowledge that no external consultant can replicate. The gap is not in their capacity but in how global systems value and resource what they have built.

IPPF Africa Regional Office has a responsibility — one I take seriously — to ensure that African voices are not just present in regional and global spaces, but that they are shaping the agenda in those spaces. The Bali GA was explicit about this: we are a Federation rebuilding its strategic direction toward 2028, and that direction must be led from the ground up, not handed down.

On courage, coherence, and what comes next

Six weeks is not long enough to have answers. It is long enough to have better questions.

The question I keep returning to is this: in an environment defined by shrinking resources, coordinated opposition, and shifting political ground, what does it mean to lead with courage? Not the rhetorical kind but the operational kind. The kind that shows up in which partnerships we prioritise, which battles we take on publicly, and how honest we are willing to be with each other about what is working and what is not.

At the GA in Bali, IPPF as a Federation committed to reconfiguring its strategic priorities and declaring its political intentions toward 2028. For the Africa Region, that declaration must be grounded in what I have seen and heard over these past weeks: communities that are not waiting, organisations that are not fragile, and a movement that needs coherence and resourcing more than it needs new frameworks.

I am under no illusion that the road ahead is straightforward. The post-ODA landscape is reshaping the funding architecture our partners have built their models on. Anti-rights actors are learning from each other at a pace that demands we do the same. The gender justice and bodily autonomy agenda is contested in ways it has not been in recent decades.

But I did not take this role to manage a steady state. I took it because I believe the foundation for SRHR in Africa is solid enough to build something more intentional, more interconnected, and more honest about the world we are actually in.

Africa's women, girls, young people, and marginalised communities have never needed us to have all the answers. They need us to show up with integrity, to fight with clarity, and to build with them — not for them.

Six weeks in, that is the leadership I am committing to. Not because it is comfortable, but because it is what this moment demands.

Dr. Claudia Shilumani is the Regional Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation Africa Regional Office (IPPF ARO), based in Nairobi, Kenya. She writes in her personal capacity as a leader and advocate within Africa's SRHR movement.