EH!WOZA

Eh!woza grew out of the desire of a biomedical researcher to engage with people disproportionately affected by TB and HIV (myself), together with an artist (Ed Young) to use his technical and conceptual skills to address social inequality. 

Initiated after implementing a pilot project in 2013, Eh!woza was formally constituted as an NGO in 2020. During its first year under pandemic conditions, we established a solid foundation as a young organization. However, the next 12 – 18 months form a crucial period for the organization to scale and prosper. The Elevate Prize presents a timeous opportunity to accelerate and affirm the growth and sustainability of the organization. It will enable the development of existing and new collaborations locally and globally through developing skills and perspectives necessary to elevate and diversify our work. 

The success of Eh!woza’s media products relies on its high production value: science communication products engagingly provide accurate information, and documentaries tell stories about the social impact of disease with contextual relevance. Strategic amplification would be invaluable. 

Mentorship provides the opportunity for strategic guidance over this delicate period, ensuring Eh!woza’s growth and sustainability and the chance to strengthen our innovative evidence for the impact of our work.  

I’ve recently been repeating that I’m not sure what to call myself, and I am not unhappy about that. I trained as a biomedical researcher conducting doctoral research (2011 – 2015) on drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis at UCT’s Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM). During this time (2013), I co-founded Eh!woza, initially as a one-off event for postgraduate students to engage people affected by the diseases we were studying. Following my  PhD, I took up postdoctoral research at CIDRI-Africa, and a Carnegie Corporation DEAL fellowship then saw me taking the first steps towards a formal academic career. 

By 2019, the growth of Eh!woza’s impact and our vision for the future led to successful fundraising to establish Eh!woza as an independent NGO and for me to take up full-time employment as co-director.

So what am I? I’ll always be a scientist at heart. But through Eh!woza, I’m excited to bring together the social with the biomedical. To affirm that health is about cells and molecules and livelihoods and lived experience. To demonstrate that communicating and engaging with people affected by disease leads to positive health choices. To support the next generation of leaders in health research and engagement.

Eh!woza’s work started with a focus on TB – a disease that affected 10 million people globally in 2019. With at least 58 000 South Africans dying of TB in 2019, until COVID, TB was the leading cause of death here. The COVID pandemic surpassed these numbers, reinforcing the need to invest in solutions that address infectious disease. 

The importance of biomedical interventions like new drugs and vaccines can’t be overstated. HIV first showed us, and now COVID has made it clear that disease and social conditions can’t be decoupled. Diseases like COVID and TB disproportionately affect people living under conditions of poverty, both with higher rates of infection and mortality and a more significant impact of containment measures. Crucially, both pandemics have shown that without public understanding, trust and buy-in, interventions to prevent or control disease will not have the desired impact.

We address this by providing a vehicle for genuine two-way public engagement, advocacy for consideration of social conditions in which disease occurs, skills development, and the provision of accurate and in-depth information targeted at young people. Our model has proven scalable to different health areas and has impacted beneficiary networks and the digital space.

1. Collaboration is our cornerstone: Eh!woza’s core team of eight staff consists of biomedical scientists, artists and young people who have come through the program. Our wider network extends to world-class biomedical and social science research institutes, national and grassroots media outlets, other NGOs and the local arts community. This strategic nurturing of collaborations is invaluable to our work: it allows us to draw on diverse skillsets, expertise and influence when seeking to re-focus activities or develop new ones. 

2. Beneficiary needs are at our core, and we foster an active culture of inclusion: Identifying changing beneficiary needs and shifts in the landscape is vital to iteratively adapt our programmes and maintain relevance. We endeavour to create a culture of paying attention – we seek project design and implementation while actively listening to beneficiaries. The inclusion of beneficiary views at a high level allows the organization to quickly and effectively respond to changing dynamics.

3. We invest in people: Eh!woza places a strong focus on human capital growth. Capacity development focusses on beneficiaries of programmes (Eh!woza Alumni). This approach maintains an ethos of authenticity and appropriate representation of our outputs/products and our commitment to the young people we work with.

We have a dual approach to achieve impact. The first is intensive and targeted investment in a smaller number of beneficiaries, rather than only focussing on generic techniques to reach numbers. We hypothesize that this impact will be longer-lasting and have ripple effects within beneficiary neighbourhoods and social networks. From this perspective, our primary beneficiaries are young people (aged 13 – 27) living in areas within the Cape Town region that have a high burden of locally relevant diseases, specifically HIV and TB and, more recently, COVID. We have intensively engaged over 100 adolescents and young people. Coupled with this, we reach a broader audience via our digital platforms and partnerships. Our media was viewed at least 1 million times in 2020, with growth expected for 2021. 

Underpinning all of our work is the awareness of the need to develop human capital. Over the past year, we have trained and employed three previous beneficiaries of Eh!woza’s programmes to nurture people that can ultimately lead the organization. 

Finally, demonstrating impact will be crucial to our sustainability. We are building impact assessment models that apply both qualitative and quantitative techniques, with early data indicating we are approaching the desired impact.