Eh!woza: Advancing South African CE Infrastructure for ID and Climate&Health

Eh!woza (https://ehwoza.com) operates at the intersection of public engagement, youth advocacy, science communication and skills development to bring together the biomedicine of disease with its social impact.

Our work is primarily youth-focussed and based in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town where high rates of TB and HIV (and increasingly NCDs) converge with social challenges such as unemployment, poverty, and interpersonal violence. Up until 2020, Eh!woza’s work was administered within the University of Cape Town.

A Wellcome Discretionary Award in PE in 2020, catalysed Eh!woza’s transition to independence, facilitating the establishment of an independent NPO. The award started just before Covid necessitated a national lockdown, restricting key outcomes of the award. Nevertheless, Eh!woza was able to rapidly refocus and remained productive during the pandemic.

Work proposed here will provide Eh!woza the opportunity to fully develop sustainability plans that had been tempered by Covid and to co-create, with Wellcome, two pieces of discovery work.

The first builds on Eh!woza’s existing partnerships and capacity to strengthen community engagement across the lifecycle of clinical research in Infectious Disease; and the second will reposition Eh!woza’s capacity in health engagement to understand, make visible, and design approaches for contextually relevant engagement around Climate & Health.