• MedEx
• NWIP
• Target X
• Small Arms
• SPARC

• The Campaign
• Start a group
• What you can do
• Reports

• Brain Drain
• Refugee Camp Project
• Pen Pals for Peace
• Endorsement Criteria
• Project Coordinators

Students Promoting Activism and Recruitment Campaign

In 2004, more than 100 students from all over the world attended the IPPNW Student World Congress in Beijing.

From all over the world?

Well, not quite.

In past years, we've had some problems recruiting students from several countries, even a few with otherwise highly active and motivated IPPNW affiliates and large student chapters in the past. Some groups have become inactive as the main protagonists graduated and moved on into the physicians' work in IPPNW without taking care of continued recruitment amongst younger students.

While countries like Finland, India, the US, El Salvador, or Palestine have managed to maintain high student membership (in Germany, for example, students make up more than 10% of the total members), some other countries have not.

Here's a map, showing the current centres of student activity:

The situation is especially worrying in Africa, Latin America, Easten Europe and parts of Asia. This development might not seem to influence the work of IPPNW right now, but it will have serious repercussions in the future, when finding interested physicians to continue IPPNW's mission will pose an even greater problem than today.

We, as IPPNW's International Student Representatives have talked about this problem many times and have come up with a concrete plan to combat this situation and spread the sparks of student activism, aptly named SPARC - the Students Promoting Activism and Recruitment Campaign.

This campaign combines different strategies, which have been shown to work in local, national or regional recruitment campaigns in the past. Now, we take these initiatives to a global level.

The first step of the campaign was to contact former student members in the respective countries in order to get their ideas and input on how such a campaign could be realized in their affiliates. In the Netherlands, in Russia or in Africa there have formerly been very active student members (some of whom even acted as regional or international student representatives). Winning these students to support our campaign, means we are able to utilize their experiences and contacts to make great progress in their respective countries.

Next, we have published a number of informative publications such as posters and flyers, which are easy to copy and send by mail so that we can rely on helpers in the different regions to dublicate and distribute them. If financial aid is necessary for large quantitites of copies, this has been requested from the international student budget. These posters and flyers include contact adresses and our homepage, as well as focus on concrete projects, such as NWIP, MedEx, ReCap or student congresses. By giving students an idea of what IPPNW is about and combining this with a concrete project, the probability of a success will increase. Instead of asking students to "inform themselves and start a local group", as we've done (unsuccessfully) in the past, we would give them the opportunity to "work in a Refugee Camp" (with ReCap), "practice and learn abroad" (with MedEx) or "meet and discuss nuclear topics with Indian and Pakistani students" (with NWIP).

In addition to these publications, we offer this website, where participants in the campaign can exchange ideas, plans and success-stories, communicate problems they've been having or post the results of their initiatives. There is also be a page including informations for interested new-comers, cited on the publications and with links to the main student homepage and other IPPNW sites.

We aim to ensure that the active student members all over the world, as well as the physicians of all affiliates will be informed about the campaign through e-mails and asked to participate. We can then provide them with publications and ideas on how to go about recruiting members. Through the website, they can communicate their progress, receive tips and motivation from successes of other people and see the campaign developing.

German students can visit universities in their neighboring countries or students involved in the NWIP or MedEx program can give talks about IPPNW as they travel to other countries. There's bound to be more ways in which such promotion would be possible (student exchanges, rotations abroad, ERASMUS, etc).

We retain new members by supporting interested students through invitations to congresses, visits, information materials and, most importantly, by asking them to participate in projects such as NWIP. We've come to the conclusion that expecting students to start up new IPPNW groups from scratch is a lot to ask for and that by introducing single students to the organization through participation in programs or by inviting them to congresses, we can ultimately reach more people than if we just wait for students to organize themselves locally, without ever having had the chance to meet other IPPNW students in person or to have worked in IPPNW projects.

While the long-term goal would be to expand the IPPNW student movement to countries all over the world, the concrete goal of this campaign is to identify interested students in the different countries and to invite them to upcoming IPPNW Student World Congresses, where we can reflect on the campaign, decide on the next steps and evaluate the progress made so far. This progress, which the campaign is making towards this goal would also be published on this website.

If Beijing has shown us anything it is that there's a number of interested students out there all over the world, who just haven't heard of us yet. Similarly, there are a ot of active medical students in other organizations, such as IFMSA, seeking a broader political agenda. A recruitment campaign such as the one we’re planning, which would not only include students, but also physicians from countries with low student participation, might be just the right way to ensure continuous student activity and lay the foundation for future generations of IPPNW physicians, while at the same time getting them acquainted directly with the experienced physician members. We hope to win the backing of some of the IPPNW affiliates and be able to motivate physicians and students throughout the continent to participate in the campaign.

Please direct any comments, remarks or questions to ippnw@web.de.

Khagendra Dahal and Alex Rosen
2004-2006 IPPNW International Student Representatives