This essay begins by describing various areas of volunteering, such as volunteering to build social capital and skills-based volunteering, where volunteers offers specific skills, such as medical skills. It goes on to outline the benefits of volunteering. Volunteering contributes to the development agenda by strengthening the voice of civil society organisations so they can influence policy, both at local and national levels, for the promotion of sustainable development and the improvement of livelihood security. Volunteering also helps to support communities to participate in development at local and national levels, as well as support communities to gain access to resources for local development and the improvement of essential services and to respond effectively to the HIV pandemic through programmes of prevention, care and support. Volunteering can support communities to realise their human rights, especially those of women and children.
Governance and participation in health
In 2015 Good Governance Africa (GGA), in conjunction with specialist researchers MarkData, conducted a survey to test public attitudes towards key aspects of governance in South Africa. In 2016 GGA commissioned MarkData to conduct a Voter Sentiment Survey. Respondents were selected using a random multistage sampling process. The survey findings are to some extent in line with the 2011 South African Reconciliation Barometer. The survey showed that in cases relating to government performance, the widely held view was that all areas (administration, economic development and service delivery) required attention and improvement. Participants suggested that service delivery is the priority, followed by economic development and then administration. It was also found that more voters are deploying their vote strategically in relation to their perceptions of governance, despite feeling that they have little say in how they are governed. The authors argue that this reinforces the need for further research and for greater engagement with the voters on the ground, particularly in areas where poor local government performance has been detected.
The authors review how the global plan fits with national health policies and ownership in Uganda, and global health governance. They report that despite a ‘whole-of-society’ approach, the decision-making power in the global plan remains with governments. Community and civil society participation are highlighted throughout the GAP and comprise one of its seven core themes. However, despite the announcement of the GAP plan in October 2018, it was not until June 2019 that a public consultation process started, seeking feedback from non-state and state actors to some chapters of the GAP. At the same time, the authors raise concern that a ‘whole-of-society’ approach opens the door for the private-for-profit corporate sector to engage in health, further encouraging a move to a privatised, undemocratic and inequitable global health governance. Without explicit and concrete frameworks for monitoring, mutual accountability and clear and effective participation to address ever-growing power imbalances, they question whether the goal of accelerating achievement of health for all by 2030 can be met, and suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic could be a first test case for the GAP.
The field of transparency is packed with vocabulary that suggests opposition or conflict, with labels that imply, somehow, that the watchers are above the watched, like white knights fighting the dark forces of development aid, the corrupt and incompetent. However collaboration between watched and watchers may also offers a better chance of generating positive change, by understanding the political context of the activities being monitored, targeting the right people, in a non-threatening way, offering solutions as much as identifying problems. In other words, being a successful ‘watchdog’ is argued to be all about knowing how to approach different people in different circumstances to achieve mutually beneficial goals. This article explores how to build the demand side of aid transparency. It raises that beyond accessing relevant, timely and accurate data, is to learn to make use of it in a strategic way, with a constructive mind, taking into consideration local political dynamics, and the reality and psychology of the people whose performance one aims to monitor and improve.
This paper is a case study of legal empowerment through community paralegals and Village Health Committees in Mozambique. The authors explored how community paralegals solved cases, the impact they had on health services, and how their work affected the relationship between the community and the health sector at the local level. Case resolution conferred a sense of empowerment to clients, brought immediate, concrete improvements in health service quality at the health facilities concerned and seemingly instigated a virtuous circle of rights-claiming. The program also engendered improvements in relations between clients and the health system. The authors identified three key mechanisms underlying case resolution, including: bolstered administrative capacity within the health sector, reduced transaction and political costs for health providers, and provider fear of administrative sanction.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a curable and preventable disease, yet it is still infecting and killing millions of people throughout the world. This article discusses how more efforts are needed to address the increasing incidence of TB and HIV in many southern African countries. Advocacy efforts need to encourage governments and international funding agencies to develop appropriate responses to urgently address the co-pandemics.
The webinar, chaired by ROAPE’s Yao Graham in Ghana, asked what is happening across Africa since governments ordered the clampdown. The discussants looked at the impact on the continent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures taken against it. All the speakers addressed what was happening at grassroots and national level, and how the popular classes were being affected. Reporting from Kenya, Gacheke Gachihi and Lena Anyuolo asked if the state was really fighting Covid-19 or the poor? They argued that since the curfew was enforced across the country the police continue to brutalise and terrorise people living in informal settlements. Femi Aborisade reported a constant struggle for food and survival in Nigeria, and an intensification in the repression of the poor during the country’s lockdown. In South Africa, Heike Becker looked at the reaction of the government, the struggles of poor communities and the urgency of building new activist groups and politics in the country. Tafadwza Choto from Zimbabwe reported that the government was using the virus as a cover for wider repression. Taking on the broader political economy of the crisis, Gyekye Tanoh addressed how economies and politics are likely to be reshaped by the virus and its consequences, with a likely impact of the global recession on the continent, the IMF and IFI responses and the costs for workers, peasants, social movements, activists, and radical projects.
Their ubiquity in South Africa makes cellphones an easily accessible tool to use in participatory approaches to addressing HIV and AIDS issues, particularly in school contexts. In this article the authors explore a participatory visual approach undertaken with a group of rural teachers, using cellphones to produce 'cellphilms' about youth and risk in the context of HIV and AIDS. Noting that the teachers brought highly didactic and moralistic tones into the cellphilms, the authors devised a “speaking back” approach to encourage reflection and an adjustment to their approaches when addressing HIV and AIDS issues with learners. They draw on the example of condom use in one cellphilm to demonstrate how a “speaking back” pedagogy can encourage reflection and participatory analysis, and contribute to deepening an understanding of how teachers might work with youth and risk in the context of HIV and AIDS.
This action research is an effort to capture the voices of community leaders and bring the resilience priorities of poor, disaster-prone communities into debates that will shape the new policy frameworks on disaster risk reduction to be launched in 2015. For the most part members of poor, disaster-prone neighbourhoods worst affected by natural hazards and climate change are absent from current consultations. Yet, it is these communities whose survival and wellbeing will be most affected by the policies and programmes that emerge from these debates. Five recommendations emerged from this study. 1. Invest in community-led transfers to scale up effective resilience practices. 2. Incentivise community-led, multi-stakeholder partnerships; create mechanisms that formalise community roles in government programmes to make them more responsive and accountable to community resilience priorities. 3. Foster community organising and constituency building in addition to technical know-how for building resilience. 4. Set aside decentralised, flexible funds to foster multi-dimensional community resilience building efforts. 5. Recognise grassroots women’s organisations and networks as key stakeholders in planning, implementing and monitoring resilience programmes.
Talking to French magazine Esprit, theorist Achille Mbembe discusses a postcolonial thinking that has developed in a transnational, eclectic vein, enabling a specific take on globalization. He outlines three cardinal moments in the development of postcolonial thought. The first, of anti-colonial struggles, included the self-reflection by people of their colonization and debates on the relationship between class and race as factors. The discourse centred on the politics of autonomy, to acquire citizen status and, thereby, to participate in the universal. The second moment, around the 1980s, he outlines as the moment of "high theory", with new thinking on knowledge about modernity. This understood the colonial project beyond its military-economic system, to one that was underpinned by a discursive infrastructure and a whole apparatus of knowledge the violence of which was as much epistemic as it was physical. The second post colopnial discourse sought to recover the voices and capabilities of decolonization's rejects (peasants, women, underprivileged people) and to better understand why the anti-colonial struggle led not to a radical transformation of society. Mbembe argues also argues that it sought to expose the procedures by which individuals are subjugated to categories of race and class that block access to the status of subject in history. In the third moment, Mbembe argues that globalisation has, as for colonial capitalism, subjugated living spheres to economic appropriation, and that the "colony" was in fact a laboratory for the wider authoritarian destiny of today’s globalisation. He proposes that in this context the reinvention of politics in postcolonial conditions first requires people to reinvent their place in history, not in a logic of repeating the same violence as vengeance, but in a demand for a justice that supports an "ascent in humanity“.