What About Rural Health?™ Partners with ICCP 2026 Conference in Nigeria

PRESS RELEASE. JANUARY 26, 2026

Community Psychology Reconnects to the Source: ICCP 2026

Lagos, Nigeria – What About Rural Health?™ (WARH) has announced a strategic public engagement partnership with the 11th International Conference of Community Psychology (ICCP 2026), scheduled to take place in Lagos, Nigeria, from August 28 to September 7, 2026, and hosted by Lagos State University (LASU).

Themed “Gathering in the Motherland: Celebrating Ways of the Waters and Reconnecting to the Source,” ICCP 2026 marks a historic return of the global community psychology movement to Africa. The conference repositions the continent not as a peripheral case study, but as a central source of knowledge, practice, and community healing – wellbeing, mental health, and social transformation.

Announcing the conference at a press briefing on the 12^th of January 2026, Professor Andrew Zamani noted that ICCP 2026 offers Africa an opportunity to showcase originality in knowledge production while actively dismantling lingering colonial imprints on psychological systems. He also highlighted the conference’s potential to boost tourism, strengthen professional networks, and create meaningful connections among African community psychologists across the continent and the diaspora.

Dr. Moshood Olanrewaju, Convener of ICCP 2026 and President of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA), explained the significance of hosting the conference in Nigeria, pointing to the global influence of Nigerian community psychologists in leadership and scholarship, and the deep resonance of the discipline with everyday African life.

“Empowerment, prevention, and promotion are everyday practices across Nigeria and Africa,” he said, noting that community psychology closely mirrors everyday African realities.

ICCP 2026: LASU Hosts

Professor Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University and Chairperson of the Local Organizing Committee, described community psychology as an action-oriented discipline focused on improving wellbeing at both community and societal levels. She emphasized that ICCP 2026 will prioritize inclusion and accessibility, ensuring participation from persons with disabilities and individuals from diverse social and geographic backgrounds.

She further noted that hosting ICCP 2026 aligns with LASU’s strategic efforts to mobilize partnerships and sponsorships at national, regional, and global levels, while generating economic, hospitality, and tourism opportunities for Lagos State. Conference participants, she said, will not only engage in high-level scholarly discourse but also experience the rich cultural, social, and creative life of Lagos, with assurances of safety, transportation, accommodation, and security.

WARH? IN ICCP 2026

As part of ICCP 2026, What About Rural Health? ™ will host a dedicated engagement session, taking the form of a roundtable discussion, exploring how community psychology can be mobilized to advance rural health equity, particularly within African and Global South contexts. The session will foreground lived experiences from rural and underserved communities, examining how global psychological frameworks can become more responsive, ethical, and attentive to best practices, to deliver quality care even when shaped by African realities.

Beyond the session itself, WARH’s partnership with ICCP 2026 will focus on public-facing media PR, communication and knowledge translation, ensuring that conference insights move beyond academic spaces into translatable tools that engender communities’ programs designs, policy conversations, and practice. WARH’s engagement will include editorial publications, podcast conversations, visual storytelling, and reflective field documentation, amplifying voices often absent from global community health discourse.

For What About Rural Health? ™, ICCP 2026 represents a critical moment to deepen conversations at the intersection of community psychology, rural and underserved populations, indigenous knowledge systems, and everyday African practices of care, resilience, and prevention. At the heart of this collaboration is a shared commitment to community wellbeing, empowerment, prevention, social justice, and improved access to quality healthcare for rural community dwellers – principles that sit squarely at the core of both community psychology and rural health practice.

Also see:

LASU to host International Conference of Community Psychology

LASU to host confab on Community Psychology