With age, many women dream of retiring and being taken care of by their loved ones, but the challenges they often face make that dream a far-fetched reality.

Due to poverty and illnesses, these women, ‘super grannies,’ not only end up caring for their sick children, but also become primary care givers to their orphaned grand and great grand-children.While the AIDS epidemic continues to plague the area, youth, in particular, are being affected by the deadly disease, leaving their children behind.

To support these families, a group of inspirational grandmothers from Khayelitsha formed, Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids (GAPA), an organization that offers financial and psychological support to affected families.

According to the site, the project recognises the challenges faced by these grannies. It also celebrates their ”unity” and strength in their communities, as both carers and activists.

Through this project, thousands of grannies have benefited from skills that include parenting, first-aid, and learning income generating activities such as vegetable gardening and handcrafts. The work by these grannies eradicates harsh realities of poverty to orphans and brightens their future.

As well, they share educational messages by singing and dancing at bus stops and handing out condoms to passengers.

Their hard work, dedication, and perseverance has paid off as they are now receiving international recognition. A photo exhibition about the day in the life of these grannies will be installed in Cape Town in May 2011and Washington DC. USA from July to September 2011.

It is said that the exhibition will be the premise of a book about these grannie’s lives, coordinated by South African Journalist Eric Miller and award-winning South African Journalist Jo-Anne Smetherham.

Show your support! To learn more about the project, click here.

Photo: GAPA

Ordinary South Africans can be trained to collect research data using cellpones. Photo by: Kiwanja.net

A new study has identified how more ordinary people from rural and peri-urban areas can become involved in research, simply by using their mobile phones.

Currently there are a couple of organisations in South Africa that train people at grassroots level to collect data for research projects. This is an excellent way to uplift these people and create job opportunities.

All over Africa, health research done with the help of mobile phones is increasing. Creative Consulting & Development Works recently wrote a newsletter article about this phenomenon, referred to as mhealth. To read the article, click here.

The most recent study on mhealth in South Africa (published December 2009) entitled The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: A report from a household survey in South Africa, set out to “investigate the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey”.

Local women from Umlazi, close to Durban, hired as community health workers, were contracted by the researchers to collect data. None of the 24 women had any previous experience of data collection, but all had mobile phones and could SMS. They received 2 days of training using the software installed on their phones.

Researchers can check the quality of data collected more easily using mobile phones. Photo by: Rachel Strohm

Over the course of four months, 39,665 households were surveyed by these women. There were no hardware or software failures using the mobile phones.

The researchers found that the benefits of using mobile phones for data collection are as follows:

• Quality checks could be performed in real-time, and inconsistencies could be detected and rectified in a timely manner.
• The automated graphs and reports allowed the project manager to see how many surveys were completed on an hourly or daily basis.
• Data falsification could also be detected. If an unrealistic number of surveys were completed in a specific time, the project manager would be alerted that something is not right.

And of course, the income it generates for unskilled workers used to collect this data, is very valuable.

The researchers came to the conclusion that this is a “feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored”.

Read more about the study here.