Healthy DEvelopments Healthy DEvelopments - The Managing Editor

The saying ‘dance like nobody’s watching’ has been turned on its head by an ambitious, award-winning campaign inviting young people in Africa to ‘dance like everyone’s washing’. With World Water Day coming up on 22nd March 2024, Ruth Evans reports on Dance4WASH’s campaign to use the joyful ‘universal languages’ of dance, music and art to promote better hygiene and people's right to clean water in a fun and engaging way. 

Expanding vaccine production in Africa, now a key objective for the continent, will require a highly skilled workforce with the necessary expertise. This is why German development cooperation is supporting vaccine production-related further education and training through the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. The recent African Advanced Vaccinology course is one example.

With much publicity, the world’s population reached eight billion on 15th November 2022. What has been much less publicised is that at least a billion of these people live with disabilities - an enormous group that, according to the just launched WHO Global Report on Health Equity for Persons with Disabilities, is often underserved or overlooked when it comes to health care.
In this ‘Healthy Developments' podcast, Frederick Dove – who is himself one of the billion – talks to people who are personally affected and people working to change and improve health care for people living with disabilities. We hear about the key messages of an important new report that has just been published: ‘Reimagining Health Systems that expect, accept and connect one billion people with disabilities’. Co-authored by the Missing Billion Initiative and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, with funding by GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development,  the report draws attention to the unmet health needs of people living with disabilities and draws up roadmap for action to ensure they are ‘expected, accepted and connected’.

Convincing communities that vaccines are safe and countering misinformation is a major challenge to public health efforts all around the world. Anti Covid-19 vaccination disinformation is spreading and conspiracy theories are rife. The more transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19 has increased the urgency of vaccinating as many people as quickly as possible. Yet, only around 2% of Africans have been fully vaccinated so far, mostly due to a shortage of vaccines. But a sizeable number of people are also reluctant to get vaccinated. This is a great cause for concern in countries like Malawi, where COVID-19 infections and deaths have risen sharply in the past few weeks.

In this Healthy Developments podcast we hear about some innovative ways of overcoming those challenges in Malawi.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments around the world to send whole populations into lockdown. For poor people in low-income countries the situation quickly turned desperate. Quick and efficient digital tools could help to get social cash transfers to their doorsteps. However, developing and constantly updating the software required for such schemes is simply not an option for the governments of many low and middle-income countries. But openIMIS is.

In this podcast we mark the fifth anniversary of openIMIS, an open source management information system supported by German and Swiss development cooperation which helps countries like The Gambia, Nepal, Tanzania and Cameroon to digitally manage different social protection schemes. Supported by a vibrant worldwide community of developers and users, openIMIS is increasingly regarded as a ‘global good’ and an important tool for helping countries to meet their commitments to universal health and social protection.

Not long ago in Nepal, like in many other lower-middle income countries, healthcare waste - from personal protective equipment, such as gloves and gowns, to used swabs and bandages, expired drugs, needles, laboratory reagents and chemicals – was simply dumped behind health facilities, mixed with general waste and sent to landfills, or openly burned.Health officials and municipal authorities across Nepal are now working hard to address these issues as part of a new focus on environmental health.

Ruth Evans speaks to some of those on the forefront of this effort and reports on the progress being made.