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The WHO defines Community Health Workers (CHWs) as lay people who live in the communities they serve and who function as a critical link between those communities and the primary-healthcare system. In Africa, they provide low-cost interventions for common maternal and pediatric health problems such as pneumonia, diarrhea, undernutrition, malaria, HIV, measles and now COVID-19. They also assist with immunization.
Today Moussa’s work with the Accountability Lab focuses squarely on countering misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, namely myths about the new coronavirus’s origin and transmission. Some people think Africans are immune to the virus or that it doesn’t spread in warm weather,” Moussa says. He’s making a concerted effort to counter these and other COVID-19 myths. As Moussa sees it, changing minds in Mali hinges on access to reliable information from medical experts.
It’s Sunday night at Aba House, an open-air bar in Lomé, Togo’s capital, and stylish young men and women in modern African dress fill the dance floor as the bass guitarist pumps up the tempo. Powerful! Soulful! The lyrics are in Mina, a local language in southern Togo and parts of neighboring Benin, but the music is unmistakably Afro-Cuban, a genre with global acclaim. The weather is cool, the air filled with a misty marine breeze coming from the roaring Atlantic Ocean.
Government staffer Souhayata Haidara enjoys talking about her life in a patriarchal society. Her career is a triumph of patience and perseverance, she tells Africa Renewal with a smile and a wink. Ms. Haidara, currently the Special Adviser to Mali’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, says she was lucky not to be married off at age 14 like some of her peers. Her father resisted pressure from suitors and relatives and insisted that the teenager be allowed to complete high school before getting married.
In the fight for gender equality, women around the world have advanced in small and large ways. Yet for women in Africa, progress is measured in micro steps, and the struggle has a long way to go. The good news is that women’s rep-resentation in political decision making has been on the rise globally. The not-so-good news is that the increase has been stubbornly slow, barely 1% in 2018 compared with the previous year. In 2018 the number of women ministers world-wide reached an all-time high at 20.7% (812 out of 3922).
