University reaches out to local pregnant women

Wits has reaffirmed its commitment to making water available to all during the World Water Day commemoration on Friday.

Spokesperson Pamela Tshandu said the main focus was on mitigating the impacts of extreme heat on pregnant women at Laudium, Stanza Bopape and Mamelodi clinics.

She said working with communities, sharing knowledge and resources, and embracing innovation and partnerships, “we can build a future where water is available and is accessible for all”.

“We believe that water is a source of life, unity, prosperity, and peace for all.”

On Friday they visited community clinics in Mamelodi as part of their climate change and health project that involves several countries in Africa, including South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire.

“We collaborate with leading universities in the European Union and the United States, and the World Health Organisation is also a key partner on several projects,” said Tshandu.

“Our research is mainly supported by grants from the US National Institutes for Health, the European Union Horizons programme and Wellcome Trust. We also work closely with IBM on our data science portfolio of work. All our work is investigator-driven,” she said.

“We have strategically targeted pregnant women and infants as these are the population groups that are placed at the centre of almost all health programmes in Africa to date.

The focus on this population group means there are well-established workforces, monitoring systems, advocacy networks and funding streams we can leverage,” she said.

“In our more recent projects, we have added a focus on protecting health workers.”

She said the Covid-19 pandemic provided a stark reminder that the protection of health and well-being of health workers be placed firmly at the centre of any response to public health threats.

“In our work, we highlight that the health sector response to the climate crisis needs to take this fact on board and to shore up the overall resilience of the health systems against extreme heat,” she added.

“The projects apply rigorous research methods in field conditions to establish the effectiveness of interventions in real-world settings.”

These interventions are then intended to be implemented at a large scale and adapted to specific contexts.

“Most projects are set in two or more regions of Africa, aiming for relevance across the continent.”

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