DR. EVEROLD HOSEIN (Ph.D)
Political Leader
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Dr. Everold N. Hosein was born in Trinidad and Tobago in the small sugar-cane village of California many, many years ago. His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. He is the eldest of 6 children. He attended a village kindergarten/pre-school ran by a local teacher. Miss Rose, in her home. His primary school education was at the California Government Primary School, and Esperanza Presbyterian School. His secondary education was at Presentation College, San Fernando, where he completed his Cambridge University A-levels in Physics and Mathematics, not doing very well in either. In his final year at Presentation College he won the Jaycees National Public Speaking Contest in Trinidad and Tobago. He was a member of the Presentation College Platoon of the Trinidad and Tobago Cadet Force, reaching the rank of 2nd Lieutenant and officer in charge of the Platoon in 1965. He prepared the platoon to win the Shield Award as the top cadet platoon In Trinidad and Tobago in 1967. After obtaining his A-level certification, he was then invited by Presentation College to teach at the college. He taught English and Mathematics. At the same time, he began a weekend radio assignment on Radio 610 in Port of Spain, co-hosting a three-hour Saturday morning radio programme for teenagers, Satteen Session, together with Jones P. Madeira under the guidance of Dick Hernandez, and Leo De Leon, 610s Programme Director. This was the beginning of his professional career using communication and the mass media for engaging young people. |
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Two years later Dr. Hosein was awarded a U.S. State Department sponsored scholarship to study at the University of Kansas (KU), where he completed his Bachelor’s degree (graduating Summa Cum Laude) with a major in Journalism/Broadcasting and Film, and a minor in psychology. He also served as an Instructor in Interpersonal Communication in his final year. He married Barbara Hughes, a fellow KU student from Ottawa, Kansas just before graduation. In his final year at the University of Kansas, he and his fiancée were named “Jayhawkers”, a designation recognising top campus leaders. He worked next for a little time with the Continental Telephone Corporation in St. Louis and also served in Barbados with Continental’s affiliate, the Barbados Telephone Company, as an advisor on setting up an educational cable television network for schools.
He and his wife attended graduate school at the University of Michigan where he completed a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in communication, with a special focus on marketing communication, and also served as a Teaching Fellow in Speech Communication. He then served as an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. His wife completed her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Michigan in the same period.
He returned to the Caribbean in 1974 and served as a Research Fellow at the University of the West Indies (UWI)/St. Augustine/Trinidad and Tobago, Department of Agricultural Extension, working in the Windward Islands of St. Lucia, Grenada, Dominica and St. Vincent, on improving banana cultivation. He then moved to Jamaica to be a Lecturer in the UWI Institute of Mass Communication, serving as its Director (ag.) for two years, and introducing three new degree programmes in Mass Communication combined with Arts, Social Science and Management Studies. It was at UWI Dr. Hosein began developing new approaches to applying communication methods and techniques to the process of social and economic development, described as “development communication”. And it was at this time also that Dr. Hosein began consulting assignments with the United Nations (Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Health Organization/Pan American Health Organization, the World Bank, UNESCO), and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), in New York.
He eventually joined IPPF in New York as its Caribbean Programme Advisor and also Information-Education-Communication Advisor. He was instrumental in fostering research on adolescent fertility in the Caribbean and in developing major family planning communication-education campaigns in the region. He led efforts to establish the secretariat of the Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation in Antigua, with support of the USAID, and helped shape the CFPA into a major family planning communication, education, and training institution in the Caribbean. He also managed a major USAID-funded initiative to integrate family planning programmes in the maternal and child health services of the Ministries of Health in the Eastern Caribbean. He then served at IPPF as the Director of Programme Support for the Latin America and Caribbean Region, managing public communication programmes, fund-raising, evaluation, and contraceptive commodities supplies.
In 1992 Dr. Hosein joined the global public relations company of Burson-Marsteller in New York as their Social Development Counsellor, undertaking assignments with the World Bank and other UN agencies in using the techniques of the private sector in public relations and marketing communication to achieve behavioural goals in health and social development. His first assignment was with the World Bank in Venezuela undertaking an assignment from the Minister of the Family (a member of Opus Dei) to get Venezuelan men to be more sexually faithful.
While at Burson-Marsteller, Dr. Hosein began a three-week summer institute at New York University titled “Integrated Marketing Communication for Behavioural Impact in Health and Social Development”, for communication professionals from the developing world. In 2000 the World Health Organization in Geneva invited Dr. Hosein to serve as its Communication Advisor. And it was at WHO that Dr. Hosein developed the new approach to global public health communication now called COMBI, Communication for Behavioural Impact. It is a strategic communication planning approach for public health education and behaviour now used by WHO in about 70 countries and also by UNICEF in about 20 countries. The communication planning method has also been used by UNFPA, UNWOMEN, UNEP, and UNDP.
The key challenge faced by WHO and other UN agencies in terms of public health communication was the gap between people knowing what to do to improve their health and their carrying out the behaviour. Dr. Hosein’s COMBI approach stressed that it is relatively easy to inform and educate people about recommended healthy behaviours but that it is quite another communication challenge to get people to actually carry out these behaviours. As Dr. Hosein puts it: It is one thing to know, another to do.
Pulling together his years of public communication experience, and his work at Burson-Marsteller and New York University, Dr. Hosein developed the 10-Step COMBI Planning Process which went beyond informing and educating the public but worked in focused manner on getting behavioural results. He founded a strategy for blending the traditional approaches of information-education-communication with the private sector’s successful experience with integrated marketing communication and applying this blend in a strategic way to the behavioural challenges in public health, and not just focusing on having people be aware and informed.
Dr. Hosein now serves as the Senior Communication Advisor-Consultant with World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, and as a Communication Consultant to UNICEF, UNFPA, UNWOMEN, UNDP, and UN Environment. He has also served as an advisor to the Emirates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, PLAN International and Malteser International. He has worked in over 130 countries. He has served as Adjunct Professor at New York University and Indiana University. He is currently a Distinguished Scholar at City University of New York/Graduate School of Public Health.
His communication work has focused on the following fields: child nutrition, early childhood education, children‘s welfare and girls education, children and violence, water and sanitation, communicable/infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases, environmental education, reproductive health (including maternal/child health, family planning and HIV/AIDS/STI prevention), violence against women, female circumcision, health promotion, university education, agricultural and rural development, population and development, and banking/monetary policies.
Dr. Hosein is a Registered Farmer with the Ministry of Agriculture/Trinidad and Tobago. On 10 acres/4 hectares of inherited land in Woodland/Sapatay, he plans a sheep farm, a tilapia farm, and organic fruit and vegetables cultivation.
He is the father of two children, one an IT expert who has worked with Google and SpaceX, and the other a physician. He has four grandchildren
PARTY STRUCTURE
Dr. Everold Hosein will serve as the Political Leader of the Green Party but will not serve as a Member of Parliament representing any one constituency. The Political Leader of the Green Party will be advised by an Advisory Board appointed by the Political Leader. Other details of the party structure and the process for selecting Green Party candidates to run in elections will be announced in due course.
