African Nutrition Matters -- Winter 2016
Profiles Reported by Dr. Elom Aglago
Fré Pepping Fré, you founded the French-Speaking African Nutrition Leadership Programme in 2007. Could you share with us what motivated you to establish such a programme?
Fré Pepping, Ph.D. Founding member of Anglophone and Francophone African Nutrition Leadership programmes
My own PhD supervisors have been very supportive of the leadership programmes, Professor Jo Hautvast was one of the founding fathers of ENLP (European Nutrition Leadership Programme) and Professor Clive West was responsible for ENLP for several years. Hautvast and I, together with the people from North-west University in Potchefstroom, took up the challenge of putting together ANLP in 2001 when I was on sabbatical in South Africa. Then in 2005 I was approached by Nada Benajiba (ANLP 2002) to establish a leadership initiative for West Africa. Originally Kraft Foods was very interested but in 2007 we started with Danone International Institute as the main sponsor. At that time, in 2007, one of our main drivers was to keep people connected/involved in the area of nutrition. In those days we had no initiatives such as SUN. Today PLAN is celebrating its 5th edition, what has been achieved so far? The small core group has managed to set up five editions within 8 years and with a good website up and running since 2012 we managed to maintain contacts with the alumni. The 2012 group stayed in close contact with each other and managed to maintain a certain momentum. Do you have regular contacts with PLAN alumni (the PLANistes, ndrl) and how are they still paving the leadership roles in their respective countries and institutions? Oh, yes. Several alumni came to courses/scientific meetings in Wageningen (my home base) and I met several of them during ECOWAS-meetings and IUNS meetings. The 2012 group kept each other informed about their activities and informed us all about initiatives in their home countries. We are aware that Africa needs leaders in nutrition, more than other continents, while considering the big and secular challenges we are still facing. Do you think that PLAN, which trains 25 candidates at each edition, will sufficiently handle the leadership gap in French Speaking Africa? Yes and no. We have to be realistic. Not all of the > 500 people that attended ENLP over the past 20 years are still active in the field of nutrition in Europe at the moment.
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