This website is a space for community activists living near mines in southern Africa to share information, resources and experiences. The countries currently participating in this project are: Lesotho, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique and Tanzania. Activists in each country document problems they experience and events they participate in and share this on a WhatsApp group. These posts are then shared on this site in the respective country blogs. Each country, in addition, maintains their own country blog. Additionally, Activists can view the posts on a mobile app called “Action Voices” which can be downloaded on an Android phone from the Google Play store. The activities of this project are managed by the Bench Marks Foundation on behalf of regional organisations.
Useful Resources
Crowdsourcing tools, such as challenge contests, are increasingly used to improve public health. Crowdsourcing is the process of having a large group, including experts and non-experts, solve a problem and then share the solution with the public. This guide provides practical advice on designing, implementing and evaluating crowdsourcing activities for health and health research – with descriptions and examples of contests collected through a challenge contest The guide includes: descriptions of and methods for challenge contests for health and health research; how to organize and evaluate contests; practical resources, such as a challenge contest checklist; case studies; and a table of commended challenge contests for health submitted through the report’s challenge contest in 2017. The report was developed by the Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health (SESH) and the TDR-supported Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI).
In this TED talk, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie warns of ‘the danger of the single story’. She describes how impressionable and vulnerable people are in the face of a story, particularly as children. She notes that stories matter, but also that many stories matter and no single story can portray a reality. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
This CBS News video reports an investigation of child labour in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, revealing that tens of thousands of children are growing up without a childhood today – two years after a damning Amnesty report about human rights abuses in the cobalt trade was published. The Amnesty report first revealed that cobalt mined by children was ending up in products from prominent tech companies including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Samsung. According to the CDC, "chronic exposure to cobalt-containing hard metal (dust or fume) can result in a serious lung disease called 'hard metal lung disease'" – a kind of pneumoconiosis, meaning a lung disease caused by inhaling dust particles. Inhalation of cobalt particles can cause respiratory sensitization, asthma, decreased pulmonary function and shortness of breath, the CDC says. An estimated two-thirds of children in the region of the DRC that CBS News visited recently are not in school. They're working in mines instead. CBS News' Debora Patta spoke with an 11-year-old boy, Ziki Swaze, who has no idea how to read or write but is an expert in washing cobalt. Every evening, he returns home with a dollar or two to provide for his family.
The Nossal Institute, in collaboration with UNICEF and FutureLearn, has developed a free online course in health systems strengthening. This course aims to develop skills and confidence in policy makers, managers and clinicians working in health systems to analyse system problems and take decisive, evidence-based actions to strengthen their system. It covers health system structures, functions and components, and how they interact. How to use evidence, and analysis of inequity, to drive interventions to strengthen health systems. It also addresses strengthening health systems through action in areas such as health policy, financing, human resources, supply chain management, quality of care and private sector engagement and using complex systems thinking to address health system problems.
New mining activities are playing an increasing role in Malawi's economy. This video reports on the situation of families in Malawi affected by new mining activities , and the health problems of families living near coal and uranium mining operations. It reports on the gap in health system capacities to diagnose and address these challenges. While the mining company indicates that they test the water used by these communities and provides the results to government, people in the community are not aware of the results.
This resource provides a range of films which are useful training materials and resources. Films include reflections on community actions towards improving health, such as Community Working Group on Health (CWGH) documentary on “Strengthening Community Feedback Mechanisms for Improved Health Service Delivery” and a documentary film on “How South Africans are taking food security into their own hands” by a student featuring individuals from Klapmuts, Belhar, and Gugulethu in the Western Cape who are initiating food gardens and other programmes to empower their communities and strengthen food security and sovereignty. A short documentary tells the story of the Network of Community Defenders for the Right to Health, users of healthcare services that have organized themselves to identify problems, engage with authorities for resolutions and demand accountability. Also featured is a training video which explores the role of Health Committees from different perspectives – from that of a facility manager, a health care provider, health committee members and patients. Two further films from the Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) project reflect on the social determinants of health and the importance of responding to community health issues in a more holistic manner.
PHM follows closely the work of WHO, both through the World Health Assembly and the Executive Board. A team of PHM volunteers attends WHO bodies’ meetings – following the debate, talking with delegates and making statements to the EB. The PHM’s commentaries covers most of the agenda items of the WHO bodies’ meetings and includes a note on the key issues in focus at the meeting, a brief background and critical commentary. Reports on key issues are also prepared. PHM is part of a wider network of organizations committed to democratizing global health governance and working through the WHO-Watch project. Information from PHM on the proceedings of the May 2019 World Health Assembly can be found at the website provided.
Digital health, or the use of digital technologies for health, has become a salient field of practice for employing routine and innovative forms of information and communications technology (ICT) to address health needs. The World Health Assembly Resolution on Digital Health unanimously approved by WHO Member States in May 2018 demonstrated a collective recognition of the value of digital technologies to contribute to advancing universal health coverage (UHC) and other health aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This guideline presents recommendations on emerging digital health interventions that are contributing to health system improvements, based on an assessment of the benefits, harms, acceptability, feasibility, resource use and equity considerations. This guideline urges readers to recognize that digital health interventions are not a substitute for functioning health systems, and that there are significant limitations to what digital health is able to address. It presents a subset of prioritized digital health interventions accessible via mobile devices, and will gradually include a broader set of emerging digital health interventions in subsequent versions. It includes the following topics: birth notification via mobile devices; death notification via mobile devices; stock notification and commodity management via mobile devices; client1-to-provider telemedicine; provider-to-provider telemedicine; targeted client communication via mobile devices; digital tracking of patients’/clients’ health status and services via mobile devices; health worker decision support via mobile devices; provision of training and educational content to health workers via mobile devices (mobile learning-mLearning).
Anew local app hopes to give African writers global exposure by connecting them with literature fanatics in SA, US and the UK. Storytelling app BookBeak says it is the first African app-based platform to aggregate African short stories from published, unpublished and self-published writers and serve them to a global audience. The app, available on Android and iOS app stores, was founded by three young South Africans, Kamo Sesing, Cam Naidoo and Louis Enslin, and registered under their business Atheneum. Africans have been telling stories for centuries, passing nuggets of cultural knowledge and heritage from one generation to the next through fables, folktales and narrations. BookBeak aims to make it possible for those new and old African stories to be shared with the world in the form of e-books and audio books, while bridging the gap between traditional and digital reading experiences.