Lucica Ditiu
Stop TB Partnership

Hello everybody. My name is Lucica Ditiu. I'm the executive director of the Stop TB Partnership, and I am extremely honored to be able to share a few thoughts with you.

I'm happy that you decided to take this course. It's a course on how to advocate for new tools for TB.

Anyone can be an amazing advocate.

You need to share an immense love and empathy for people with TB that we need to help. And you need to know how.

And this is what this course is about, learning the how can you become a better advocate.

In TB every single voice is very important and every single voice needs to do a lot of advocacy because we need to have the new tools and we need to be able to not only have them,  to roll them out and to ensure access to this new tools for everyone that needs them in a way that is equitable and is, presented in the same way throughout the entire world.

I am very excited about this course because it gives you the opportunity to go through the entire course at your own reading. You can take moments of pause and you can go back.

At the end of it you will be able to develop your own advocacy plans, which I think is amazing.

But more important than that, you will remain with an amazing set of skills that you hopefully will use to really push forward the agenda for TB.

But you can use it for anything else. Sometimes people are shy. Sometimes people go into too long discussions when they should be more concise.

Sometimes it's very difficult to get the right message that an advocate will have in a meeting with high level stakeholders.

You will be able to master all of this and we need every single one of you to master this because we need the new tools. We need them in the TB response. Without that we have zero chances to ending TB. So doing that, it depends on every single one of you that enrolled in this course.

Good luck and be awesome. Thank you.