The Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is home to more than 260 million people, with transboundary rivers, lakes and groundwater bodies: 15 great rivers with their respective river basins in Southern Africa are shared between two or more countries. Water, however, does not recognise international boundaries. The joint management, protection and utilisation of water in Southern Africa is therefore not an option - it is a necessity. Bridging Waters is a docu-drama series illustrating how water in Southern Africa is sustainably managed according to SADC's Protocol on Shared Watercourses. Narrated through the lives of those living along Southern Africa's rivers and depicting their daily challenges, Bridging Waters connects local settings with transboundary management and exemplifies the local impacts of improved cooperation between countries in the region. Shot in 10 countries over a period of two years, the series delves into the waters of the Zambezi, the Limpopo, the Kunene, the Ruvuma and the Orange-Senqu. Rivers are the lifelines of Africa, and the film shows the shared responsibility to keep them flowing: clean and jointly managed for the benefit of all.
Useful Resources
The Africa Health Budget Network is a group of African and global organizations and individuals already using or wishing to use budget advocacy as a tool to improve health service delivery in Africa. The network has three strands of work and provides formal training opportunities, events and tools. The network promotes learning and sharing within the network and coordinated and focused pressure on African leaders with respect to their health financing commitments.
Building Blocks: Africa-wide briefing notes is a set of six locally adaptable resources to help communities and local organisations in Africa support children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS. These resources are based on the experience of the Aids Alliance, its partners and other organisations and have been produced in English, French and Portuguese.
Originally developed for Gendernet, this online guide is intended to support the design and delivery of gender training. As a resource, the guide provides ‘building blocks’ that facilitators can use to design customised training workshops and has been designed with the assumption that potential learners have little or basic understanding of gender and development concepts. Training modules cover topics like gender inequity and poverty, gender analysis and planning, gender-aware designing, planning, monitoring and evaluation in terms of gender, gender mainstreaming and organisational change, including policy approaches to addressing gender and equality in development and developing advocacy strategies. Facilitators’ tools include ice-breakers and energisers. There are also suggested workshop plans that provide ideas for how this guide can be used to design workshop outlines.
Building Blocks: Africa-wide briefing notes is a set of six locally adaptable resources to help communities and local organisations in Africa support children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS. These resources are based on the experience of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, its partners and other organisations and have been produced in English, French and Portuguese.
It is thirty years since the Alma Ata Declaration which outlined an international consensus on the need to provide universal access to primary health care (PHC). During the ensuing years some countries established and consolidated well-organised government health services in which PHC played an important role. Many others were less successful. Some countries have experienced major reversals in life expectancy after a long period of steady improvement and their health systems have deteriorated. There is a growing concern by national governments and the international community to expand access to PHC and they have committed a lot of money for this purpose. But there have been many major changes in these last three decades that pose big challenges for the future configurations of PHC. This key issues guide unpacks some of the challenges for the future of PHC and highlights promising models of health system arrangement and service delivery that are improving access for the poorest and most marginalised. It focuses on four main areas: the increasing marketisation of health and how governments respond; the challenge of responding to progressive and chronic illnesses; the emergence of new epidemics and the globalisation of public health responses; and the pressure to keep up with new treatments and technologies.
The Centre for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation (Cadre) is a South African non-profit organisation working in the area of HIV/AIDS social research, project development and communications. Cadre has offices in Johannesburg, Grahamstown and Cape Town. Cadre's main objective is to ensure that relevant social research is applied to developing a coherent and systematic response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa. The Cadre website offers a wide range of downloadable publications and a searchable bibliographic database.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), with support from PEPFAR, is leading an initiative on the transformative scale up of health professional education in low and middle-income countries. This process of scaling up health workers is proposing a change from "business-as-usual" in order to ensure that there is not only an increase in the numbers of health workers but in their quality and relevance to the communities they serve. Driven by population health needs, transformative scale-up is a process of education and health systems reform that addresses the quantity, quality and relevance of health care providers in order to increase access to health services and to improve population health outcomes. This cannot be done without the involvement of all relevant stakeholders at the country and regional levels. WHO are therefore inviting participation and call for input on‪ how you can advocate with WHO for scaling up transformative education at the country level, and what WHO can contribute to your efforts at the country, regional and global levels.
This manual aims to assist civil society organisation in campaigning for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Millennium Development Goals form an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty and improving lives. World leaders formulated the MDGs at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000. Each goal contains one or more targets to be reached by 2015, and each country has to set realistic, time-bound and measurable national development goals in line with these targets.
Canada's Access to Medicines Regime provides a way for the world's developing and least-developed countries to import high-quality drugs and medical devices at a lower cost to treat the diseases that bring suffering to their citizens. It is one part of the Government of Canada's broader strategy to assist countries in their struggle against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases. This website has all of the information that developing and least-developed countries, non governmental organisations and pharmaceutical companies need to take advantage of the regime.