Leading Through Complexity: The LMG Programme Forges a New Generation of Health Leaders from South Sudan

Getting to Strathmore University Business School from South Sudan is not simply a matter of booking a flight. For the cohort of senior National Malaria Control Programme officers, district health managers, Health NGOs representatives, faculty from University of Juba, and Ministry of Health officials who arrived in Nairobi for the ELEMMINATE Leadership and Management in Governance (LMG201) workshop, the journey had begun months earlier — in the offices of government directorates, across and through a logistical process that required the ELEMMINATE team to anticipate every obstacle before it arrived. Ministry travel approvals, documentation delays, and last-minute redeployments are the ordinary friction of working in any complex health system. The team navigated them with the same methodical persistence it would bring to the training itself. When the cohort finally gathered at SBS, the sense that something had already been accomplished — before the first session even began — was palpable.

The South Sudan team was welcomed warmly by Dr. David Mathuva, Associate Dean, Academic and Student Affairs, set an immediate tone of hospitality and intentionality. His opening remarks to the group were not merely ceremonial — they communicated, from the outset, that this was an institution that had prepared for their arrival and was invested in what the week would produce. That spirit of attentiveness proved to be no accident. True to Strathmore Business School’s theme for the year — Personalised Attention — Dr. Caesar Mwangi, the Dean of SBS, made a point of visiting the cohort mid-week. It was not a brief appearance. Dr. Mwangi sat with participants, asked about their experience, listened to how the sessions were landing, and engaged directly with the content they were working through. For a group of health leaders accustomed to institutional hierarchies in which senior figures remain at a comfortable distance from the frontline, it was a gesture that did not go unnoticed. Several participants later remarked that it made them feel genuinely seen — not as beneficiaries of a programme, but as professionals whose work and growth mattered to the institution hosting them.

South Sudan carries one of the heaviest malaria burdens on the continent. Years of conflict have hollowed out health infrastructure, stretched the workforce thin, and created a governance environment in which health leadership is often improvised rather than developed. It is precisely this context that makes the LMG programme both urgent and necessary. Under the ELEMMINATE project, The LMG programme has so far trained over 400 health leaders across 12 African countries.

The opening session set an immediate tone of challenge. Prof. Ben Ngoye, Principal Investigator of the ELEMMINATE project, asked participants to define leadership. The answers that came back were familiar ones: authority, seniority, rank. He argued that leadership was about influence — the ability to move people and systems toward better outcomes, regardless of where one sat in an organogram. For health workers who had spent years waiting for directives from above while watching solvable problems persist around them, it was a disorienting but generative reframe. The room’s energy shifted. By the end of that first morning, participants were already discussing how much they had been leaving on the table.

Prof. Gilbert Kokwaro, Co-PI of the project, extended that reframe into the domain of resources. Health spending in South Sudan, as in much of the region, is typically treated as a cost — a burden on already constrained government budgets. Kokwaro offered a different frame: health is an investment, and leaders who can articulate that case compellingly to finance ministries, district councils, and donor representatives are leaders who can move resources. The session on health economics and resource mobilisation drew directly on South Sudan’s own financing landscape, and participants worked through practical exercises on how to construct and present a budget case for malaria programming that could survive political scrutiny.

The workshop’s structure was deliberately progressive, each day building on the last, moving participants from the personal to the institutional. Among the sessions that generated the most energy — and, initially, the most surprise — was the Clarity 4D personal assessment. Participants had not anticipated that a health leadership programme would ask them to examine themselves quite so directly. The tool uses a colour-based framework to map individual personality profiles: how a person naturally leads, how they respond under pressure, where their instinctive strengths lie, and where they are likely to encounter friction — both within themselves and with colleagues who operate from different orientations. The colours arrived not as labels but as mirrors, and the room’s reaction shifted quickly from mild scepticism to something closer to recognition. Health workers who had worked alongside each other for years found themselves understanding, perhaps for the first time, why certain conversations had always felt difficult, or why particular colleagues consistently approached problems from angles that seemed baffling. The debrief that followed was one of the most animated of the entire week, with participants mapping their team dynamics against what they had just learned about themselves and each other.

From that foundation of self-awareness, the cohort moved into stakeholder engagement and coalition-building. Participants mapped the governance landscape around their own malaria programmes — who controls the budget, who influences the decision-makers, where resistance lives, and where untapped alliances might exist. Examples from Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, and Burundi, drawn from the ELEMMINATE network’s accumulated experience, gave the exercises comparative texture without losing specificity to South Sudan’s context.

The third day’s focus on data-driven decision-making resonated with force. South Sudan’s health information systems are still developing, and the gap between data collection and data use is wide. Participants were frank about the constraints: incomplete DHIS2 records, limited analytical capacity at district level, and a reporting culture that prioritises compliance over learning. The facilitation did not paper over these realities. Instead, it equipped participants with frameworks for making the best decisions available given imperfect information — and for communicating that decision-making process upward and outward in ways that build institutional trust. It was, several participants noted, the first time they had discussed data not as a bureaucratic requirement but as a leadership tool.

Resource mobilisation and advocacy followed, addressing one of the most persistent challenges in South Sudan’s health sector: the gap between identified needs and available financing. Sessions combined practical budget-building exercises with advocacy skills training, including role-play scenarios in which participants presented evidence to simulated government audiences. The emphasis was on translation — converting epidemiological data into the kind of narrative that moves a budget holder. For participants operating in a context where donor dependence is high and domestic health financing remains fragile, this module offered something close to a survival skill.

Central to the ELEMMINATE programme’s philosophy is a conviction that Africa’s most intractable health challenges will not be solved in isolation — they will be solved through deliberate, sustained collaboration between African institutions and African leaders. With that in mind, the networking events during the workshop week were designed with a specific ambition beyond the usual pleasantries of professional mixers: to plant the seeds of a lasting cross-border relationship between South Sudan’s delegation and their counterparts in Kenya. To that end, the ELEMMINATE team was proud to welcome the Kenya Medical Association to the table, bringing together two communities of health professionals whose proximity on the map had never quite translated into the kind of structured partnership that the moment demands. The conversations that unfolded were frank, energised, and forward-looking — a recognition, on both sides, that the challenges facing South Sudan’s health system and the expertise residing within Kenya’s medical community are not unrelated problems but complementary parts of a shared continental story. It was a first meeting in what the ELEMMINATE programme hopes will become an enduring alliance — one rooted in the belief that better health in Africa will be built by Africans, together.

The strategic alignment between the ELEMMINATE Project and South Sudan’s National Malaria Control Programme, cultivated through the Ministry of Health relationships that underpinned the workshop logistics, ensures that what was learned in Nairobi has a pathway back into the institutions that need it most.

Article by: Judith Adhiambo Amolo