This study explored the reproductive health and rights’ needs and challenges amongst young refugee women in South Africa. It was carried out in eThekwini in South Africa in 2021 and 2022 through 35 semi-structured, in person interviews with young refugee women 18 and 24 years old living in the city centre. Eleven of these women had experienced one or more pregnancies while living in South Africa and all of these women had experienced at least one unintended pregnancy. Participants had poor reproductive health knowledge of the role of menstruation and how conception occurs. Economic, social, and legal insecurities intersected in complex ways as determinants of poor reproductive health outcomes. Despite availability, contraceptive use was poor and linked to lack of knowledge, myths and unwanted side effects. There were negative economic and social impacts for young refugee women experiencing early pregnancies irrespective of whether they were intended or not. Desire for confidentiality shaped lack of access to legal termination of pregnancy in the public health sector. Participants experienced specific vulnerabilities resulting from their position as refugees despite length of stay in South Africa. It is important to better understand these specificities in the design of programmes and policies aimed at ensuring positive health outcomes for these young women.
Governance and participation in health
This study assessed people’s knowledge of the COVID-19 vaccine and the effect of misinformation on vaccine uptake among healthcare workers (HCWs) and the general population in Uganda. This was a cross-sectional quantitative study conducted in 2022, including 311 HCWs and 253 from the general population. The study revealed that the proportion of vaccinated HCWs (77.4%) was significantly higher than that of the vaccinated general population (64.4%). The research revealed that a large proportion of the participants (89.7%) encountered rumours regarding unverified adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccine that significantly contributed to vaccine hesitancy,. The study showed a negative impact of misinformation on vaccine uptake and could be the most significant contributor to vaccine hesitancy in future vaccine programs.
A special survey module included in the Afrobarometer Round 9 questionnaire explored citizens’ experiences and perceptions of pollution, environmental governance, and natural resource extraction. It showed that a majority of Batswana see pollution as a serious problem in their communities, with inadequate trash disposal as the most serious offender. They believe that ordinary citizens must assume primary responsibility for reducing pollution and keeping their communities clean, but they also expect “much more” from the government to protect the environment – including tighter regulation of natural resource extraction.
The Kenyan content moderators who built the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT have filed a petition in parliament seeking a probe into the bot’s parent company OpenAI and its local moderation partner Samasource. The Sama employees allege exploitation and underpayment during the creation of the popular chatbot and want the Kenyan government to investigate and regulate the work of tech companies operating in the country. They claim they were not properly informed of the nature of the work they would be undertaking, which involved reading and viewing material that depicted sexual and graphic violence and categorizing it accordingly so that ChatGPT's AI could learn it for purposes of its future interactions with people. All through the ChatGPT training process, the workers say they were not afforded psychosocial support and that due to the exposure to the work, they have developed severe mental illnesses including PTSD, paranoia, depression, anxiety, insomnia and sexual dysfunction. Additionally, the moderators say the contract between OpenAI and Sama was terminated abruptly, sending them home despite already suffering from severe mental illness. The moderators want parliament to enact laws regulating the outsourcing of harmful and dangerous technology work and protecting workers engaged in such work.
Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) is a non-profit design and community development organisation that partners with under- resourced communities to advance equity and activate the unrealized potential in their neighbourhoods and cities. Involving the community in the development of the Kibera Public Space Project automatically creates a sense of care for the local community, through local ownership and management. During this process, public spaces create opportunities for learning, employment, and activism for the community. That kind of contextual and human centred thinking is transferrable. The process that was developed in Kibera has now been replicated in other parts of the world, including in the USA.
Stigma is a recognised barrier to health-seeking behaviour and a social determinant of population health. This study draws on qualitative data collected from 55 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s and 23 caregivers as part of a wider ethnographic study to explore the lived experience of Parkinson’s disease in Kenya, using the Health Stigma and Discrimination Framework as a tool to understand stigma as a process. Participants reported their lived realities of stigma, and experiences of stigma practices, which had significant negative health and social outcomes, including social isolation and difficulty accessing treatment. Ultimately, stigma had a negative and corrosive effect on the health and wellbeing of patients, highlighting the interplay of structural constraints and the negative consequences of stigma experienced by people living with Parkinson’s in Kenya. Targeted and nuanced ways of tackling stigma are suggested, including educational and awareness campaigns, training, and the development of support groups.
This study sought through focus group discussions to identify the priorities of community members of a South African township, Soweto, and describe the underlying values driving their prioritisation process, to improve nutrition in the first 1000 days of life. The authors used a modified public engagement tool: Choosing All Together which presented 14 nutrition intervention options and their respective costs. Participants deliberated and collectively determined their nutritional priorities. All groups demonstrated a preference to allocate scarce resources towards three priority interventions school breakfast provisioning, six months paid maternity leave, and improved food safety. All but one group selected community gardens and clubs, and five groups prioritised decreasing the price of healthy food and receiving job search assistance. Participants’ allocative decisions were guided by several values implicit in their choices, such as fairness and equity, efficiency, social justice, financial resilience, relational solidarity, and human development, with a strong focus on children.
This paper is based on a comparative, inductive, practitioner-led analysis of program monitoring data from 18 multi-level health advocacy campaigns. The findings emerge from analysis of a “Heat Map,” capturing grounded accounts of government responses to community-led advocacy. Officials in eight out of 18 districts were noted to have fulfilled or surpassed commitments made to community advocates. Government responses included: increased monitoring, more downward accountability, countering backlash against advocates, applying sanctions for absent health workers, and increased budget allocations. Advocates’ bottom-up advocacy worked in part through triggering top-down responses and activating governmental checks and balances. Methodologically, this article demonstrates the value of analyzing process monitoring and program data to understand outcomes from direct engagement between citizens and the state to improve health services. Survey-based research methods and quantitative analysis may fail to capture signs of government responsiveness and relational outcomes many hope to see from citizen-led accountability efforts. Practitioners’ perspectives on how accountability for health emerges in practice are argued to be important correctives to much positivist research on accountability, which has a tendency to ignore the complex dynamics and processes of building citizen power.
Zackie Achmat was one of the most vociferous voices against former president Thabo Mbeki’s HIV denialism in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1998, Zackie and a handful of others had launched what would rapidly become one of the most prominent HIV-advocacy movements in the world, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). This article follows what the authors call "arguably his generation’s most prominent social justice advocate" to his current work on other areas of engaging the state, and report Achmat's analysis of local movements. It also covers his understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic as a harbinger of a new normal — “a condition where emergencies such as pandemics and climate change disasters are not exotic happenings but things occurring at home on an ongoing basis, requiring a complete reorientation of emergency healthcare, and a corresponding reorientation of activism.”
The scale-up of successfully tested public health interventions is critical to achieving universal health coverage. This study assessed the scalability of a tested health management-strengthening intervention (MSI) at the district level in Ghana, Malawi and Uganda. The MSI was seen as credible, as regional- and national-level Ministry of Health officials championed it and district- and national-level stakeholders seemed to be convinced of its value, due to observed positive results regarding management competencies, teamwork and specific aspects of health workforce performance and service delivery. While the relative advantages of the intervention were its participatory and sustainable nature, turnover within the district health management teams and limited (initial) management capacity complicated implementation. The authors propose from the findings that improved documentation of results of the intervention can facilitate scale-up, while embedding continuous assessment with all stakeholders involved can help to adapt to changing conditions..