Our Ethics and Leadership Communities of Practice (CoP) microgrant beneficiary, Emerging Public Leaders (EPL) Ghana organized their maiden Giving Voice to Values (GVV) workshop in November 2020 with support from the Education Collaborative at Ashesi University.
The organization is based in 3 countries: Ghana, Liberia and USA. In Ghana, they run a public service fellowship program to usher graduates into the public sector. For EPL, they have found the GVV modules a useful tool to train their 52 fellows to be exemplary leaders who are uncompromising on their values.
The Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum was introduced as one of the avenues to train ethical leaders at Ashesi University. GVV at Ashesi is adapted from the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) Curriculum developed by Dr. Mary Gentile for MBA students at Harvard Business School. The course teaches students skills in ethical action and gives them the tools they need, to act ethically in value-conflicting situations.
To amplify Ashesi University’s effort to help nurture ethics and leadership development in other African institutions, the Education Collaborative organizes train-the-trainer workshops. As part of the Collaborative’s workshop held in July 2020, participants were supported with a microgrant and tasked to tailor the modules they had learned, to suit their various institutions.
Moses Cofie, the Country Director when asked why EPL decided to be a part of the microgrant program shared, “EPL seeks to recruit some of the best graduates who would usually look for employment in the private sector, into public service. When they go in there, it is important that they are not just civil servants, but rather, exemplary leaders. And so, for us, learning about ethical action using GVV modules is very important.” He added that, “this was a good opportunity to help build GVV case studies from the public sector, as most of the cases are currently based on the private sector. We will develop these not just for our use, but for the benefit of a wider community.”
With representatives from Emerging Public Leaders Ghana joining the Collaborative’s Ethics and Leadership Community of Practice, (EnLCOP) to build contextualized ethics and leadership development toolkits, the Collaborative looks forward to even more engagements in the future.