Eh!woza is a dynamic organisation that operates at the intersection of science communication, youth advocacy, community engagement, and skills development to merge the biomedicine of disease with its social impact.
Meet Eh!Woza
Eh!woza’s various programmes look at bridging the gap between biomedical knowledge and young people as well as between biomedical work and the lived experience of disease; Eh!woza recruits high school students and young adults from areas with high rates of HIV and TB; and engages them in a set of hands-on science workshops that deal with high-impact local biomedical research. Equipped with accurate information. Young people then have creative workshops where they gain the technical skills, equipment, and conceptual guidance to produce documentaries, music, poetry and music videos, as a way of reflecting personal and community experiences of HIV and TB. The documentaries reach a wide audience, and help raise public awareness of health and diseases.
By working with Eh!woza, young people become active partners in gathering research data, and facilitate access to accurate information about HIV and TB; but Eh!woza also offers a platform that encourages the enlisting of beneficiaries as active partners and facilitates access to accurate information while promoting honest conversations, storytelling, and a contextually relevant representation of health and disease. Over the long term, Eh!woza aims to encourage positive health-seeking behaviour, engender trust, and ultimately decrease stigma.
Eh!woza is part of the action
We’re excited to have Eh!woza joining the Action Plan, as this partnership is an opportunity to tackle health and unemployment holistically.
“The work that Youth Capital is doing around the Action Plan and youth unemployment, generally, is incredibly important, relevant and urgent. We’ve observed first had that high up on the list of struggles and worries among the young people we work is access to post-schooling employment and study opportunities. Youth Capital’s action plan is based on deep thought as well as research and data and is driven by young people. For these reasons, we strongly support the plan and the organisation’s work,” says Tasha Koch