TEDxJohannesburg explores the issues with local innovators and social entrepreneurs.
Many countries in Africa were not adequately equipped to withstand the shock of the coronavirus pandemic. While the continent was not unique in this regard, it has done better than expected. With that said, COVID-19 has exposed an apparent need for the people of Africa to strengthen their capacity to collect data, innovate appropriate solutions, and support programs that address the shortcomings.
Doing so could ensure that, when the next pandemic comes, African populations can be more confident of their prospects of surviving it without having to endure economic collapse and large-scale loss of life. Back in December 2020, TEDxJohannesburg, with the support of TEDx and the Skoll Foundation, hosted a virtual deep dive with local innovators and social entrepreneurs who are leading the way and stepping up to the challenge.
With South Africa and other African nations having experienced so many epidemics, what is different about reporting on COVID-19? Mia Malan, a health journalist, directs her attention to HIV and lists two significant differences with COVID-19. Firstly, COVID-19 research comes out at the speed of light, leading to reportage that is routinely subject to correction. With HIV, reporting enjoys all the benefits of time. Secondly, in South Africa, the most significant difference is in how the government has responded. For COVID-19, the response has been evidence-based, in contrast to the politicized nature of the initial response to HIV back in the 1990s.
The painful truth is that some people are at an increased risk of dying from COVID-19 purely because they’re poor. Why does this situation persist when the data we need to improve people’s quality of life is all around us? Could we use data to push society into equality? Shaneel Bachoo believes so. If we’ve relied on GDP to guide our interventions in the past, this metric is no longer sufficient. With the alternative—Social Progress Index—we can measure and carry out the real change that matters to real people.
Testing for COVID-19 has generally been chaotic in Africa during the pandemic. For Professor Wendy Stevens, a global leader in HIV and TB-related laboratory medicine, African laboratories will need to make significant design changes to ensure that they can thrive in the future. They will need to invest in two critical areas: molecular technologies, and information systems. The barriers are real, but the challenges are not insurmountable.
Medical ventilators have been central to the narrative of COVID-19 across the world. The South African government asked Professor Justin Jonas, a scientist and a technologist, to develop an appropriate, easy to operate, locally manufactured ventilator solution that will cost less money and save more lives. Within a few months, he and his team delivered twenty thousand Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) ventilator units for use in public hospitals throughout South Africa. Justin’s device costs just $80. A full-function ventilator costs a whopping $25,000.
Violinist Kabelo Motlhomi performs two South African classics, The Wedding by Abdullah Ibrahim and A Luta Continua (Portuguese for “the struggle continues”) by Miriam Makeba.
There’s a disease that kills a staggering 1.34 million people per year worldwide. It wipes more than two hundred thousand Africans off the planet annually. More than four people die from it every second. It isn’t HIV, nor is it tuberculosis. It’s viral hepatitis. In this informative talk, hepatitis patient advocate Danjuma Adda explains the ins and outs of the disease. Danjuma hopes that while we’re focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, we can also put efforts into accelerating the WHO’s stated goals of virtually eliminating the disease by 2030.
Not so long ago, everything was normal: the Mask was a movie; the Venice Carnival was a masquerade; African masks were for rituals; the N95 was a highway. All of this changed when COVID-19 arrived. Craftivist Stacey Rozen’s response to the pandemic has been thoughtful and inspiring. With the world consumed by an overload of facts and stats, data and details, and even fear, she and her community of kindred spirits sent out a call to “sew hope, love, and cloth masks,” proving that a simple cloth mask can be so much more than the sum of its stitches.
Every day, for nearly a year, the media has reported daily Covid-19 statistics. Infographics displaying insights about the pandemic have become familiar. They are shared on social media and discussed on WhatsApp groups. Was there ever a time when so many people were so interested in numbers? They even go searching online for them, looking for more. Why? Because these numbers tell their story, according to data journalists Laura Grant and Alastair Otter. Making data public gives people information that they can interrogate—it empowers them to question this data and hold people responsible.
A key feature of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the abundance of information related to the virus. This information has often been false and harmful, and tended to spread widely at speed, making it difficult to separate facts from falsehoods. In response, technologist Gustav Praekelt and his team created Health Alert, a real-time, WhatsApp-based line designed to provide accurate information to every South African. At its peak, it had five hundred thousand daily hits. Within a year, the service had reached over twenty-five percent of the population, with more than half a billion pieces of content shared.
In the first thirty-six weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa, TV reporter Liabo Setho had profiled thirty-six small businesses. At a time when lives and livelihoods were lost daily, these businesses—run by gritty, tenacious entrepreneurs—found ways to stay open. Liabo shares a passionate account of stories from her beat: a cleaning business teams up with a fashion designer and a paint manufacturer to produce forty thousand surgical masks a day; an accessories designer faces a reckoning when she realizes that in a pandemic, people will choose bread over beauty. How ready is your business for the next major disruption?
Public health specialist Dr. Anatole Manzi argues that while COVID-19 preventative measures might be reasonable for people in wealthy societies, they are out of step with what’s possible in Africa. What we need is an equity-based response. With sixty-five percent of Africans under thirty-five, the continent has the world’s most extensive youth base, with many in school. These schools have no nurse or counselor, but they have plenty of teachers. Bringing teachers into an extended public health system could give us the superpowers we need to overcome COVID-19 and survive the next pandemic.
For the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Saad Uakkas, a final year medical student in Morocco, worked as a doctor in a regional hospital emergency room. In that time, he came to see up close how the disruptions caused by the pandemic have affected the mental health of so many people, especially the youth. Research done by multiple multilateral organisations, including WHO, UNESCO, and ILO, has validated Saad’s perspective. Saad’s remedy is simply that if we cared more for each other, we could build a stronger sense of collective resilience.
Luba Kassova has been investigating to what extent women’s voices in six countries across the world—Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India, the UK, and the US—find expression in the news on essential matters, including how COVID-19 impacts their lives. She reports a disappointing and painful truth: women’s voices continue to go largely unheard, including in the news media. For Luba, the most heart-breaking consequence is that the situation seems exceedingly difficult to fix, given that—as the data clearly shows—the world is not even seeing it as broken.
COVID-19 has exposed the cracks previously hidden under the veneer of prosperity worldwide. In South Africa, the long queues of people seeking food handouts have become a feature of the lockdown. During this time, Mervyn Abrahams has led efforts to track the price of a food basket that women on low income typically buy each month. Over the same period, compared to the increase in the minimum wage, the rise in the basket price has been more significant. This development could be costly, given the importance of nutrition in resisting the virus.
For the past twenty-five years, medical scientist Professor Lynn Morris, working with others, has been trying to make a vaccine for HIV. Astonishingly, in less than a year, the world developed multiple vaccines for COVID-19. What can we learn from COVID-19 vaccines to help us to find an HIV vaccine more rapidly? We need multiple tracks for concept development; overlapping processes for testing, manufacturing, and approvals; and increased financial investment. COVID-19 vaccines will save lives and livelihoods. We need to do the same for HIV. Then we can indeed begin to dream of an AIDS-free world.
We are human, and our spirit is restless and relentless, and we will always seek ways to move forward. For once, though, the odds are stacked against us. The advantage belongs to an invisible, intangible foe. What we have learned, above all, is that we must act with wisdom and humility if we are to see this moment through.
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