Health e Communication

[Dr Edwin Mapara]

This is a contribution to the 'Pictures in HIV/AIDS Education' discussion forum. The forum is sponsored by Health e Communication and moderated by Dr. Edwin Mapara who has spent 20 years using such pictures in southern Africa and the United Kingdom. For more details see:
http://www.comminit.com/healthecomm/planning.php?showdetails=188



Editor's Note: For technical reasons we are forwarding this comment from 'basilb' to the forum as it was submitted as a page review.

I refer to the 3 comments made by Anonymous, Vaja Ntingana and Doug Storey related to an important issue that Dr Mapara has raised relating to some \'ignorant\' and \'misguided\' foreign consultants and interventions that are bought to our continent to\'HELP\'. In my view understanding this issue is so important that it represents a focus that should now be debated as a specific topic on DRUM BEAT. Doug Story says there is plenty of blame to go around and he is right. However this should not reduce the importance of what Dr Mapara is raising. In defining the steriotypes the issue is nicely articulated for us to all better understand. To compliment what Doug Story raises is our own responsibility as Africans in the tragic issue raised. By allowing what is presented as \'ignorant experts\' and imposed dysfunctional interventions free reign to intervene on our continent we have all participated in the disaster that is now unfolding. To support this views from our own experiences in the nutritional field. What we see as stereotypes in this field is extreme ignorance incorporated into many interventions from school feeding, to health interventions that become part of our problem. The vested interests that are often incorporated and which become the imposed resource that is implemented into many programs is the steriotype that we all MUST STOP especially when \'good\' known science show us it cannot work.

To help us all address this PROBLEM - we believe that we must all raise a FLAG and filtering system called AFRICAN SOLUTIONS for AFRICAN PROBLEMS. Dr Mapara\'s approach using pictures is one such good example. Only by ourselves evaluating the needs of interventions with our knowledge on the ground supported by foreign resource and state of the art known available science in the context of our own African solutions will we all be able to manage the \'land mines\' of \'vested interest and imposed foreign solutions that will fail\'. Interventions must be designed for our own situations using our own understandings of necessary parameters that we must dictate if we want successful intervention that we can therefore proudly describe as an AFRICAN Solution.

In using this approach we all as Africans have the opportunity to first define the needs necessary for success. This process will hopefully help stop ignorant untrained inexperienced so-called \"experts\" creating havoc in our communities. It will also help stop the rationalised interventions that are dictated by outside ignorance or vested interests or even local corruption and personal agendas that ensure programs fail and which will result in our communities staying in poverty.

To understand what this all means we can all re-look at failed interventions (real live cases). A clear analysis based on the needs of an African Solution will showup and highlight the steriotypes as defined by the anonymous person and supported by Vaja Ntingana and Doug Storey who includes our own participation of allowing these dysfunctional interventions and allowing through \'silence\" local corruption dictated by individual personal agendas.

I have many such steriotype examples in the field of the STERTILE Nutrition DEBATE that seem to enjoy following 40 years of failure after failure. Hopefully soon I will have the opportunity to share on DRUM BEAT these real life nutritional examples and experiences of how the \'so called\' good guys are just promoting and ensuring \'all will fail\' and that we remain the basket case we all need to now take responsibility for and which we must NOW STOP.

In the words of a PASTOR I work with - we all must now learn to HATE this thing called poverty so badly that we stop it NOW.

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