Pr Ousmane Ndiaye, chef de service de pédiatrie à l’hôpital Albert Boyer de Dakar (Sénégal) évoque les risque de la macrosomie, les bébés de plus de 4 kg à la naissance.

Pr Ousmane Ndiaye : Les gros bébés sont beaux mais risquent l'obésité

Joseph Larmarange, chercheur à l'IRD, décrit les moyens de prévention du VIH/sida en Afrique subsaharienne.

Joseph Larmarange :   La prévention du VIH/sida en Afrique subsaharienne.

Mireille Mpoudi Elamè, chercheure à l'ANRS et médecin à l'hôpital militaire de Yaoundé,  décrit les circonstances du recours à la PrEP contre le VIH/sida au Cameroun

Mireille Mpoudi Elamè : l'usage de la PrEP contre le VIH/sida au Cameroun

Pr Mamadou Abdoul Diop :  La necessaire collaboration entre les décideurs et les matéhématiciens

Ange R. Miessan, miss maths 2022 en Côte d'Ivoire, décrit sa passion pour cette science

Le délégué national de l'ONG Planète Urgence au Cameroun décrit l'impact de l'exploitation du fer à Lobé.

René Noungang : Les conséquences du projet sur les éléments abiotiques

Le délégué national de l'ONG Planète Urgence au Cameroun décrit l'impact de l'exploitation du fer à Lobé au sud du Cameroun

René Noungang : Les conséquences du projet sur les éléments biotiques

Pour l'autorité traditionnelle, le projet d'exploitation du fer de Lobé menace l'existence même de son peuple.

Sa majesté Njokou Djongo, chef du village Ebodjé, dénonce la non-protection des minorités

Un natif du village relève les contradictions qui entourent le projet.

Mckey Ngomi : Les paradoxes du projet d'exploitation du fer de Lobé

This month’s podcast explores how a data revolution can help push governments to be more accountable to meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Ndeye Fatu-Sesay of the Millenium Challenge Coordinating Unit talks about progress in Sierra Leone, and how more can be done to listen to the voices of the country’s citizens.

Next, we travel to Ethiopia for the second meeting of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership. The AEEP is struggling to meet their clean energy goals by 2020, according to Jacob Waslander, head of the Climate Change and Energy Division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands. The solution must incorporate small-scale local energy to reach more Africans, according to Gianluca Cescon, who builds microgrids in Tanzania and is head of country operations at Devergy.

Then we hear from Anne Radl of the Humanitarian Centre about a unique event to tackle development challenges. The Innovation and Development Hackathon will team students, professionals and NGOs to develop projects that will improve transparency along the global food supply chain. Past innovations include the SIM-Prints mobile biometric scanner to help Medic Mobile keep track of patient medical records.

Finally, former director of field operations at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Andrew MacMillan, pays us a visit. He talks about a school building project in one of Kenya’s poorest districts that is also helping to build community resilience to health and farming crises. He calls for new food management programmes to curb obesity and eradicate hunger.

http://www.scidev.net/global/energy/multimedia/scidev-net-podcast-africa-s-energy-struggle-the-data-revolution-and-more.html

Image credit: Dieter Telemans / Panos


SciDev.Net Podcast: Africa’s energy struggle, the data revolution, and more

زعزعة الاستقرار ثم جائحة كوفيد-19، ثم الحرب الروسية الأوكرانية عوامل فاقمت المشكلة ولم تسمح أبدا بتمام التعافي

س وج حول "الأمن الغذائي" بالمنطقة العربية مع المدير الإقليمي للفاو

In this month’s programme, we discover how technology is turning mapping into a powerful tool for supporting development and tackling humanitarian crises.

First, at the launch of the Missing Maps Project in London, United Kingdom, we join volunteers as they help to map two vulnerable areas in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, using satellite imagery to create basic maps to which local volunteers will add place names. 

Then we speak to Anna Mason from MapAction, a charity that provides mapping services after disasters, to learn more about the satellite technology underlying open mapping work.

In Congo, we discover how mobile phones help researchers fight poaching. An icon-based phone application enables people — who may be unable to read and write — living in the forest to record and map areas at risk. 

Finally, we discover how a data repository is helping journalists and policymakers understand the complex water system of the Tibetan plateau, also known as ‘the Third Pole’, which provides water that more than a billion people rely on for drinking or to irrigate crops.

http://www.scidev.net/global/technology/multimedia/podcast-open-mapping-development.html


SciDev.Net Podcast: Open mapping for development

Pr Amadou Bocoum, secrétaire général adjoint de la Société malienne de gynécologie-obstétrique.

Pr Amadou Bocoum : Etat Des Lieux Et Circonstances De La Césarienne Au Mali

Amadou Bocoum, secrétaire général adjoint de la Société malienne de gynécologie-obstétrique.

Pr Amadou Bocoum : Les Décès Suite Aux Césariennes Au Mali

Idi Saïdou, épidémiologiste au ministère de la Santé publique du Niger

Dr Idi Saïdou : Les Facteurs D'augmentation Des Césariennes En Afrique

In this month’s programme, we examine what’s on the radar for science and development in 2015.

First, we take stock of the global response to the escalating danger of climate change, with a report from the UN’s latest climate summit in Lima, Peru. We reflect on the outcome of the conference, on what ongoing efforts will be taking place over coming months and on the major milestone for climate negotiations: the next UN climate summit in Paris, France, at the end of the year.

To mark the start of the UN year of light and light-based technologies, we open our series on light technology for development by travelling to Tanzania to discover how solar power and mobile phones can fulfil basic energy needs and support grass-roots entrepreneurship.

Finally, as the world takes stock of what has been achieved within the Millennium Development Goals initiative, we discuss solutions to accelerate progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals that will succeed them. We talk to Peter Singer, a proponent of science and innovation in global health, who explains how to encourage the scaling up of innovation success, and how to measure it.

http://www.scidev.net/global/climate-change/multimedia/scidevnet-podcast-light-energy-radar-2015.html

SciDev.Net Podcast: What’s on the radar for 2015

Data is changing the world. It influences our way of learning, communicating and consuming services. And it is affecting development, informing policymaking and empowering citizens.

Since the advent of the internet, the use of data has become widespread, with faster and more powerful tools to process online information and big data sets. For example, scientists can now collect information from sources such as social media or telecommunication databases to study people’s behaviours and disease patterns.

But as technical capabilities grow at ever increasing speeds, scientists and policymakers still struggle with ethical and political issues, particularly in the developing world. In this month’s podcast, we focus on some of the main questions related to the use of data for development.

We speak with Birte Sniltsveit, an evaluation specialist who has helped to map large archives of academic information, making them available and easy to navigate, in an effort to inform policymaking around issues such as payment for environmental studies.

We then travel to Nepal with Vanessa Goas of Aid Data, where we discover how geocoding and mapping aid
projects can help to improve the impact of spending.

But data isn’t just important for policymaking and research. It is also relevant for citizens concerned about their privacy. We talk about the ethics of big data for public health with researcher Effy Vayena, who wrote a recent study on the subject.
 
This is part of a set of pieces on data funded by the Hewlett Foundation.

SciDev.Net Podcast: Tapping into data

Serge Armel Njidjou, concepteur d'une couveuse néonatale connectée, décrit ce qu'est, à ses yeux, une innovation.

Serge Armel Njidjou : C'est quoi une innvoation ?

Dodzi Kossi, le directeur de la recherche scientifique et technique au ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche du Togo tente d'expliquer les difficultés des innovations africaines sur le marché.

Dodzi Kossi : Pourquoi les innovations africaines ne sont pas assez sollicitées en Afrique

Dodzi Kossi, directeur de la recherche scientifique et technique au ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche du Togo, énumère quelques pistes.

Dodzi Kossi : Comment aider les innovations africaines à connaître du succès.

The powerful earthquake that struck Nepal on 25 April could be just the first of a series of quakes to hit the region in coming weeks. 

Future tremors could add to the current death toll of more than 4,800 people and make it harder for aid agencies to deliver help where it’s needed. While NGOs are saving lives on the ground, freeing people trapped under the rubble and building emergency shelters, we learn how a team of mappers in the United Kingdom teamed up with the organisation Kathmandu Living Labs to build a real-time map of the affected areas. Their work could allow humanitarian staff to deliver aid faster and more effectively, particularly if there are further tremors.

In this month’s podcast, we also discover how a new device that filters the blood of people with malaria may strengthen efforts to fight drug-resistant forms of the disease. The device, which works like a kidney dialysis machine, uses the magnetic properties of the infected cells to capture them and remove them from the blood.

We then talk with Melissa Leach, director of the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom, about how social and cultural factors must be considered if more-resilient healthcare systems are to be built in Ebola-stricken countries

On the issue of public health, we speak with Martin Sepulveda from the research division of the IBM Corporation, United States, about a new index to measure fairness in research.

http://www.scidev.net/global/disasters/multimedia/May-podcast-mapping-nepal-post-quake.html

SciDev.Net Podcast: Mapping Nepal post-quake and more

African Universities need to take radical action to drive change on the continent says Ernest Aryeetey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana. “Without reform, without any intention to become more relevant, they probably could not survive,” he says. Aryeetey aims to turn his university into a world-class research institution that can help transform Ghana’s economy.

In this interview, he talks about the recent reforms introduced to raise the quality and number of researchers the university produces and explains why African universities need to “internationalise”: enter into partnerships with other universities across the world to expose their researchers to the best and newest global academic thinking.

This is part of the Africa’s PhD Renaissance series funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/reforming-african-universities-economies-audio-interview.html

Reforming African universities to transform economies

Le Mali lance une campagne d’indentification des abonnés du téléphone mobile.

Interview Choguel Kokalla Maïga, ministre de l’économie numérique au Mali

It is just over a year since the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIS, declared its ‘Caliphate’ in the Middle East, after capturing vast tracts of Iraq and Syria. Today, ISIS retains its bloody grip on the region and, with no end in sight for the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, volatility in the Middle East is giving the group a dangerous territorial advantage.

But while governments thrash out strategies to rein in ISIS territorially, there is another sphere where its influence is largely unchecked — the internet. The group’s flood of propaganda videos and social media posts demonstrate a level of media production and internet savvy that have stunned its opponents.

In this audio interview, we speak to Nico Prucha and Ali Fisher, two researchers of jihadist digital tactics. They explain how ISIS’s ‘media mujahideen’ use mobile phones and HD cameras to create films that take viewers “right into the middle of the heat”.

The group’s media mujahideen are also masters of digital distribution. Fisher says this is based on a strategy centred around speed, agility and resilience. By tapping into global networks of supporters across different social media platforms, ISIS safeguards itself against the loss of individual accounts, making its online dominance hard to break, he says.

Fisher calls for a more strategic approach to reduce ISIS’s online influence by inhibiting the group’s networks as a whole, rather than stepping in to close sites after they have posted ISIS videos. This will demand global partnerships across governments, technology platforms, academic disciplines and civil society. For example, Prucha explains how a project that brings together academics, anti-extremism activists and a Sunni Muslim organisation in Indonesia aims to both compete directly with ISIS’s attempts to tarnish the name of Sunni Islam and to present an alternative, positive picture of Islam.


Radical strategies to counter ISIS’s online onslaught

The sound of male frogs croaking encourages captive frogs to mate. Researchers play it on a loop for hours in the rain chamber where fertile frogs are kept. Read more about how researchers are working to reverse the decline of endangered tropical frogs by studying their mating at : http://www.scidev.net/global/biodiversity/multimedia/frogs-conservation-prevent-extinction.html

Red-eyed tree frog calling sound

In early October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will nominate its new chair, chosen from five candidates announced in August. In this month’s podcast, we kick off a series of interviews where we hear their thoughts about the future of the IPCC and its role in informing sustainable development.

Our first two guests are Nebojsa Nakicenovic, energy economist and deputy director general of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria, and Chris Field, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US. We ask them what they plan to bring to the table in the lead-up to the UN’s climate summit in December, and about their vision for a global response to climate change.
We then discuss a project that uses biomass to power off-grid communities in rural India and produces ‘biochar’, a type of charcoal used to fertilise soil. The project’s founders expect to remove 500 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year for each plant installed and to reach one million people who are currently off grid.

Finally, we hear from a scientist who is studying the evolution of Lassa fever, a virus endemic to West Africa, which kills approximately 5000 people every year. The hope is to develop a vaccine against the virus.


SciDev.Net Podcast: Batteries from rice husks and more

When the media reports on the fight against tuberculosis, it’s usually the scientific innovations that get coverage — the hunt for more effective vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tools.  

But an issue that deserves attention is the creative approaches to TB care adopted by those shouldering most of the burden: nurses. In countries where health systems are poorly funded and understaffed — 95 per cent of TB deaths are in low- and middle-income countries — nurses play a vital role, often acting as the primary care givers for patients who might rarely, if ever, see a doctor. 

In this interview for World TB Day, we speak to Gini Williams, a TB nurse consultant and pioneer of nurse training programmes. “It’s no good having new diagnostics and treatments if you don’t have access to them and [don’t] have people who know how to use them,” Williams says. ”Services and systems around supporting patients are very important.”   

The “human nature” of TB — a debilitating disease that can take months or years to cure, where the effectiveness of treatment hinges on an individual’s needs, responses and circumstances  — demands treatments that take into account more than the purely medical, Williams says. Treatment requires a holistic approach factoring in in people’s social, economic, environmental situations and psychological needs. And nurses are often best-placed to address these and to provide the patient support and education so vital to controlling TB.

Yet nurses rarely get rigorous TB training — rarer still training that focuses on the breadth of approaches needed to tackle the disease. Williams and her colleagues at the International Council of Nurses TB Project have therefore created training courses  designed and run by nurses, for nurses. These have led to improvements in infection control, made diagnostic processes more robust, and have strengthened relationships between both labs and clinics, and nurses and patients. 

Nurses have also been trained to research what techniques work where and how to improve systems, Williams says. This both helps strengthen TB response, and means that nurses can take the lead in shaping interventions to improve the lives and treatment outcomes of millions of people.

The interview was recorded yesterday at King’s College London, United Kingdom, at the opening of an exhibition of photographs by TB nurses in South Africa, organised by TB researcher Uta Grosse. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/tb/multimedia/innovative-training-nurses-tb-care.html


Innovative training for nurses on front-line of TB care

Medics are using underground clinics and surgery guided by satellite link to save lives, says Zaher Sahloul.

Attacks on health workers in Syria have become so frequent that medical relief charities have been forced to build hospitals in bunkers and deep into the side of mountains.  

The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which provides medical relief across Syria and to refugees in neighbouring countries, now has 22 underground clinics in Syria. These care for some of the millions of Syrians living in hard-to-reach parts of the country and the 800,000 living in besieged areas, cut off from medical aid and supplies, electricity, telephone lines and food aid. 

Ingenuity and resourcefulness are core to these clinics, says Zaher Sahloul, SAMS senior advisor, in this interview. For example, with many power plants bombed out, Syrian hospitals must often rely on diesel-fed generators. But in areas under siege, diesel is unavailable so medical clinics have been testing ways of running generators on methane from animal waste. 

Meanwhile, satellite internet and video apps link Syrian doctors, nurses and medical students to medical teams in the United States. “This is the only way we know what is happening and what’s needed,” Sahloul says. “I can look at the patients and talk with the physicians and nurses and [they can] tell me what’s happening and seek advice.” 

Doctors, nurses and medical students are also being trained to treat the effects of chlorine gas, a chemical agent used frequently by the Assad regime. Virtual situation rooms, using apps like WhatsApp and Viber, guide health workers through chemical weapon response, from treatment to decontamination. SAMS also provide training in advanced trauma life support and how to use crisis technology like portable ultrasound kits.  

The care of the wounded and sick has been protected since the very first Geneva Convention of 1864, but the Syrian conflict has seen the rule book torn up, with attacks on healthcare reshaping conflict and humanitarian response. The story behind one SAMS hospital highlights the shocking “new normal” in twenty-first-century warfare.

SAMS wanted to build the hospital in a city in one besieged area, Sahloul tells SciDev.Net. “But people in the city told them: ‘No way are you going to build a hospital inside the city because that means we will be targeted.’” So the organisation moved it away from the city and dug it deep into the heart of a mountain, where the emergency rooms and intensive care units are served by a 24-metre ventilation shaft.  

Overall, SAMS had 72 clinics attacked last year by bombs, missiles and shells. The international relief charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has stopped sharing hospital locations because of attacks. A new report from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition documents 122 attacks on health centres in Syria in 2015.

““People no longer react when hospitals are bombed, doctors are killed,” Sahloul said in his keynote speech at the MSF Scientific Days on 20 May. “This should not be allowed. Not only in Syria, but [also] in the rest of the world.”

The interview was recorded during the MSF Scientific Days. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/health/multimedia/cave-hospitals-syria-front-line.html

The cave hospitals of Syria’s front line

An interview with Brian Kamanzi, UCT engineering student, on what decolonising the curriculum means to him, and why STEM students need better grounding in the politics of science, industry and development.  

On 16 June 1976, thousands of schoolchildren took to the streets of the Johannesburg township of Soweto, in protest at the apartheid government’s imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction, as well as at broader government oppressions. The brutal police response to the Soweto uprising shocked the world and became a decisive moment in the history of apartheid resistance. Estimates of the numbers killed by police vary between 176 and 700.
 
Forty years later, the country is again seeing student protests — this time about fees, education access, curriculum reform and wider social injustices — expand from student sites of struggle to reshape broader spaces of debate. This is a very different South Africa, but one that many students and others believe has not changed enough in the two decades since the fight for democracy was won.

In a pair of interviews, we hear from two students heavily involved in the #RhodesMustFall movement and #FeesMustFall campaigns. Kealeboga Mase Ramaru is a graduate of the University of Cape Town (UCT) who now works for Equal Education, a movement working for education quality and equality in South Africa. Brian Kamanzi is a UCT engineering student. 

Here they discuss the background and goals of the campaigns, and their myriad sites of struggle. They reflect on the role of digital media in twenty-first century activism and the push “to create a new politics” — one that is less dominated by patriarchal structures and that creates a fairer, safer space for female and non-binary voices. And Kamanzi discusses why it is so crucial to ensure science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses have a much stronger political component, equipping students with the critical capacity for interrogating the politics of industry and development in South Africa and beyond. 

The interviews were recorded at the Going Global conference in Cape Town, South Africa, last month, by Imogen Mathers. 

This is part of the Africa’s PhD Renaissance series on higher education across the continent, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.


http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/south-african-student-politics-soweto.html




Student politics, science and the push for self-determination

For most people a doctor is probably the first port of call when it comes to informFor most people a doctor is probably the first port of call when it comes to information about how to keep in good health. Still, much guidance gets broadcast by the media, and in developing countries the radio remains a major source of public health advice.

But just how much is the impact of the mass media? Do they save lives, and at what cost? 

For five years, the West African country of Burkina Faso has been a testing ground for a media campaign designed to answer these elusive questions using the gold standard of scientific study, a cluster-randomised clinical trial. The trial targeted child mortality, treating the media as any other health intervention and measuring lives saved after three years of continuous radio programming with information about behaviours that can prevent disease, such as taking a child to a health centre.

SciDev.Net spoke to the project’s leader, Roy Head, CEO of the social enterprise Development Media International. Head explains the rationale behind the study and offers a preview of the results, due to be published later this year. 

The interview was recorded on 23 February at the 2017 ISNTD Festival organised by the International Society of Neglected Tropical Diseases in London, UK.
ation about how to keep in good health. Still, much guidance gets broadcast by the media, and in developing countries the radio remains a major source of public health advice.

But just how much is the impact of the mass media? Do they save lives, and at what cost? 

For five years, the West African country of Burkina Faso has been a testing ground for a media campaign designed to answer these elusive questions using the gold standard of scientific study, a cluster-randomised clinical trial. The trial targeted child mortality, treating the media as any other health intervention and measuring lives saved after three years of continuous radio programming with information about behaviours that can prevent disease, such as taking a child to a health centre.

SciDev.Net spoke to the project’s leader, Roy Head, CEO of the social enterprise Development Media International. Head explains the rationale behind the study and offers a preview of the results, due to be published later this year. 

The interview was recorded on 23 February at the 2017 ISNTD Festival organised by the International Society of Neglected Tropical Diseases in London, UK.

http://www.scidev.net/global/health/multimedia/mass-media-save-lives-the-evidence.html

Do mass media save lives? The evidence is in

Journalists have a crucial role to play in creating inspirational and transformative narratives relating to the world’s complex water conflicts, specialists say in the first episode of a three-part podcast series on water conflict and cooperation. 

In this episode, special guests discuss their research on the role of the media in water diplomacy, which features in a new expert guide for journalists and policymakers launched by the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education.

Water conflicts, science and the media

SciDev.Net podcasts look at key global development issues and the ways in which science can have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction. 

Popular tracks by SciDev.Net