To enable the community Hospital Hills, an informal settlement in Johannesburg, to raise awareness and support to address the diverse environmental health challenges facing them. This will be achieved by training community members in multimedia skills and providing them with the equipment and supervision to collectively document their concerns, and any successes, and visualise them on a Crowdmap widely accessible to the public and decision-makers
Topical focus:
Country:
What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?
Johannesburg
Describe the specific community with whom you will be working.
Community members from Hospital Hills, Johannesburg, South Africa. This is an informal settlement – an unplanned slum of the poorest people living in improvised dwellings. They have little or no access to basic social and civil services and face environmental health challenges including disease, poverty and crime. In informal settlements that have undergone development, it is the residents who have been responsible for major improvements
What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?
The output will be multimedia reports on key environmental health challenges and successes in Hospital Hills, crowdsourced from the residents themselves, and visualised on an interactive map and timeline. To achieve this participants will use cellphones to document the environmental health issues experienced by residents (health, housing, food security, livelihoods and safety) in photograph, video and text reports and upload these to a Crowdmap
What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?
Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established that will contribute to the success of the project.
In Hospital Hills we have existing partnerships with: local activists, leaders and community organisations, who are taking action to improve environmental health; and with the University of Johannesburg and the SA Medical Research Council, who have been undertaking environmental health research in Hospital Hills for over 7 years. We plan to establish new partnerships with local, city, regional and national service providers and decision-makers
How many participants do you think will be involved in your project?
Thapelo Mabaso, a community leader in Hospital Hills has already been identified as project manager. Thapelo and our partners will introduce the project to the community and collaborate to select 10 diverse local project participants. They will be trained, equipped and supervised to document and upload multimedia reports on environmental health issues. They will each cultivate and train a pool of 10-20 volunteer informants to assist them
Besides the microgrant funding, what other resources and support are you seeking for your project to ensure its success?
Training of participants will draw on the Rising Voices citizen media guides. Rising Voices can also link our project to other citizen media activists in South Africa and beyond. Finally, the Crowdmap and multimedia reports generated through our project can be featured on the Global Voices network, advocating for the environmental health challenges and successes in Hospital Hills amongst a wider audience of the public and decision-makers
Contact name
Mikey Rosato
Organization
Twenty Four Frames