Seven months ago, Victor Tabbush found himself in a somewhat
unlikely place for a business school professor from California.
Instead of a lecture hall in UCLA’s Anderson School of
Management where he is a professor, Tabbush took the floor of a
classroom in the heart of Nairobi, Kenya.
Instead of MBA students, he addressed representatives of African
health care organizations struggling to fight the AIDS pandemic on
that continent.
“It was very uplifting. They are highly committed
individuals,” Tabbush said. “Their enthusiasm for
learning is very uplifting. They welcomed us and what we had to say
with open arms.”
Tabbush, along with a handful of other faculty members from the
Anderson School and UCLA’s School of Public Health, traveled
to Kenya in April 2006 for the pilot session of the Johnson &
Johnson/UCLA HIV/AIDS Management Development Institute.
Last week, Tabbush and other faculty members returned to Africa
for the second six-day session of the program.
The program is aimed at helping health organizations improve
from a business perspective ““ the more efficient and
well-managed they are, Tabbush said, the more effective they can be
in battling the disease.
“It was very, very needed,” he said. “They
need to become more efficient.”
At the most recent session of the program, Tabbush estimated
that the 36 attendees represented 19 health care organizations and
seven African nations.
According to a press release from the Anderson School, program
attendees were trained in six key areas of business.
UCLA professors taught organizational planning, operations
management, health care systems, program evaluation and monitoring,
leadership and human resources, and financial management.
“It was relevant to the enormous challenges they
faced,” Tabbush said. “They take back ideas of how they
can improve things in their organizations.”
But Fred Hagigi, a professor in UCLA’s School of Public
Health, said these organizations often face challenges beyond their
control and beyond the scope of good business planning.
“These organizations often fall victim to fraud and
abuse,” he said. “This is also happening at the
government level.”
Money designated for HIV/AIDS relief, Hagigi said, sometimes
never makes it to the organizations that so desperately need it.
Payments must be made and received through warlords.
Still, Hagigi said the skills leaders learned at the Management
Development Institute will help them secure as much funding as
possible from international organizations, and avoid problems to
the best of their ability.
“The overall experience was how dedicated people
are,” Hagigi said, adding that program attendees remained
optimistic and enthusiastic despite the challenges they faced.
“It put us to shame how dedicated these people are. The
response was overwhelmingly positive that we need more (training of
this kind).”
Tabbush specifically emphasized the importance of helping
organizations’ leaders outline a solid business plan.
International groups that fund these organizations want to see
evidence of a long-term plan before they will commit money, Tabbush
said.
Additionally, organizations that attended the program were
required to create a Community Health Care Improvement Project to
help them apply the business skills they learned to the actual
environment in which the organization works, according to the
Anderson School’s press release.
Tabbush said such a project might entail taking a model of
counseling, testing and treatment that has been well developed in
urban Nairobi and expanding and adapting it to rural areas of
Kenya.
Though they lauded the enthusiastic response of the attendees,
program officials said they faced their own organizational
challenges in getting the program up and running.
“This was not a picnic. It was a lot of work,”
Hagigi said. “There were a lot of cultural issues of what
country do we put it in without offending anyone.”
The African Medical and Research Foundation and the Global
Business School Network helped organize the program, and Johnson
& Johnson, which partners with the Anderson School on a number
of other conferences, provided the financial backing. Classes were
held at the foundation’s Nairobi headquarters.
Hagigi added that UCLA faculty communicated with local
organizers from the foundation in Kenya before they arrived in
Nairobi, to iron out as many issues as possible.
“They helped us make sure we weren’t using examples
that wouldn’t go down well (culturally),” Hagigi said.
“It was very much a collaborative effort. By the time we got
there, it was almost like we knew each other via e-mail.”
The collaboration with locals continued even after the program
got underway.
Tabbush said UCLA faculty trained local instructors during the
program’s pilot session, and now the program is taught
“almost exclusively” by African natives, though some
UCLA faculty attend each session.
And though Tabbush may be viewing the program from an
organizational perspective, the cultural differences are one of the
things he said he remembers most fondly.
“Just being around people from seven different cultures,
their different accents and ways of dress … there’s an
openness,” he said. “At the graduation, everyone was
there in the traditional dress of their cultures. There were people
from Ghana, Somalia, we had Sudanese. There were so many colors, it
was really wonderful.”