When Adam Clayton Powell III led 17 USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism students to South Africa in 2004 for journalism internships, he couldn’t have known that the experience would kick off USC’s two decades of engagement in Africa. What began as a summer program has now evolved into something much larger: the Global Health Communication Leadership Fellowship and its first cohort of African senior fellows.

The fellowship is co-led by the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health and Keck School of Medicine of USC and was launched Sept. 29. Among the inaugurated fellows are distinguished public health leaders from Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Malawi. 

Fellows will “use innovative communication tools to address pressing public health challenges in Africa, including climate change, healthy longevity, and sexual and reproductive health,” read a document shared with the Daily Trojan by Jonathan Cohen, director of policy engagement at IIGH.

Among the inaugural fellows is Mia Malan, founder and editor-in-chief of the Bhekisisa Center for Health Journalism, a donor-funded health journalism center in South Africa. Malan’s fellowship project focuses on producing short social media videos, a TV program and a webinar to raise awareness about the health impacts of climate change on mental health, HIV and respiratory diseases. 

Malan’s choice of using short videos to disseminate content stemmed from her experience addressing vaccine-related misinformation on Twitter, now called X, during the coronavirus pandemic. 

“I learned one of the best ways to address misinformation is to use what’s going around on social media as a clue as to which subject to address at which time,” Malan said. “If we want to be effective in addressing it, we need to use the channels that work best for misinformation to distribute the right information.”

Alongside Malan, three other fellows are also pursuing projects that seek to address Africa’s public health issues within their areas of expertise. Dr. Yewande Alimi from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention will “design and pilot innovative storytelling and advocacy tools” that emphasize African-led narratives, per the document shared to the Daily Trojan. 

The document also states Dr. Jepchirchir Kiplagat from Moi University in Kenya will focus her project on elevating public awareness of older adults living with HIV. Ben Malunga Phiri, president of the Eastern and Southern Africa Parliamentary Caucus for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Sustainable Development, seeks to develop communication tools that will “overcome barriers to effective communication about sexual and reproductive health and rights,” according to the document.

Powell, CCLP’s director of Washington Programs, said that the idea of the fellowship came from USC’s two decades of engagement with Africa through various USC programs. 

“[The fellowship] is the realization of a dream. We always hoped that someday we would be able to inaugurate and fund … an African fellowship program to bring African experts to USC,” Powell said. 

Malan learned about the fellowship through Cohen after previously collaborating with USC and a South African university on a webinar project. She said that the experience made the fellowship feel like a “great coming together of objectives” between USC and African health policy experts.

Powell said the fellowship program is important given the current global cutbacks in funding for health-related programs in Africa. The fellows’ projects will be funded by the University and will leverage resources from the USC Africa Student Fund, which supports student travel and research in Africa.

Malan plans to use the fellowship’s funding to hire a South African scriptwriter based in New York to help refine and format the short Instagram reels for maximum impact to have “punchy, credible, evidence-based research.”  

Additionally, each fellow will be matched with USC faculty mentors from relevant departments after their initial debrief about their projects. Powell said the program encourages students to participate in the fellows’ projects. 

“We are hoping that students will want to become involved,” Powell said. “Students need to look at these four initial projects and see which one is most consistent with their interests and their plans, academic and professional.”

To help with addressing misinformation and strengthening the project, Malan intends to incorporate USC students in the research section of her project. Malan said that it would be very helpful if students can assist her in relevant health-related research and finding the correct information to address certain misinformation trends. 

“If there’s misinformation going around in South Africa … I don’t have the capacity to go and research all the things that they say,” Malan said. “[Student research] is information I wouldn’t otherwise have had, and that will help me very much.”

Next spring, the fellows will visit Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to present their projects.

“When they present their projects, there will be partners on campus who already have been part of it,” Powell said. “This creates more of a community of research and a transatlantic network of partners that we can really begin to build and strengthen for year two.”