Battling malaria in Anam with help from Rotary: sharing mosquito nets in Ebenebe

The Dr. Aloy & Gesare Chife Foundation is developing a comprehensive package of community-based health interventions in Anam. The malaria initiative is one of the first programs initiated by the Chife Foundation and is implemented in partnership with High Noon Rotary Club Colorado, USA. The goal of this particular campaign is to eradicate malaria in the region of Anam and is a prelude to the coming construction of the Anam Hospital, which will break ground in November after the rainy season.

The first distribution of the insecticide mosquito net was led this week by Mrs. Gesare Chife in Anam City and witnessed a high turnout. The women and children of Anam were excited to see Mrs Chife visiting their homes to share the bed nets with them. She also took time to educate the village women on how to use the mosquito nets to avoid effects to their skin, as well as using her training as a nurse to issue medical diagnosis to many of the children.

The team plans to distribute more than two thousand long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets this year in the immediate village, and hopes to expand with over 10,000 regionally. These high-quality bed nets are designed to be effective without further treatment and for up to five years.

In Zone 1 of Ebenebe village, nets have been distributed to each family; this means every person in the zone is able to sleep under a mosquito net each night. This represents a ratio of two nets per household. The next zone to receive distribution will be Umuoba-Anam Otu-ocha, where another 1,000 will be shared this month. The Chife Foundation will implement a follow-up assessment to verify the percentage of nets being regularly used. On-going education in the target villages is also planned, in an effort to significantly reduce the spread of malaria in Anam.  Treated nets were chosen from among many available methods as one of the more effective ways to prevent the spread of malaria, especially amidst the climate of drug resistance and misuse that is growing in West Africa.

The Anam community and Chife Foundation greatly appreciate support provided by the High Noon Rotary Club of Durango Colorado who’s partnership has made this programming possible.

 

 

World Malaria Day 2012: How we will eradicate Malaria in Anam

MAKING ANAM A MALARIA FREE CITY

World Malaria Day is organized by the World Health Organization to recognize global efforts to address malaria worldwide. In concert with international efforts, today the Anam community is proud to launch the ANAM MALARIA INITIATIVE, a campaign aimed at eradicating malaria in the region of Anam.  As the first step in a community health strategy, we plan to achieve this by focusing resources on pregnant women, nursing mothers, children and the elderly.  Set in the context of the sustainable new town development Anam City  we will apply a hybridized approach to all health care.   The health center is more than a hospital – and aims at fostering a completely healthy town or in the Igbo “onye orun di” through high quality livability, integration of traditional methods, and focus on environment and nutrition.

Watch the video above where Chife Foundation Fellows, Linus Ifeanyi Nnewke and Anthony Nnalue launch the program!

Stay tuned for updates from our World Malaria Day event Sunday April 29 at Ebenebe which will include local performances (theater, dance, music) and refreshments.  The program (which will distribute medications, treated nets, and vector control to Ebenebe families) is developed in partnership with the Anam Community, Chife Foundation, and High Noon Rotary Club.

More information about World Malaria Day can be found with the following organizations’ websites:

Roll Back Malaria

World Health Organization (WHO)

Malaria Consortium

Development Council inspects city project site

On Monday March 12th, 2012 a quarterly meeting of the Umuoba-Anam Development Council (UADC) and Anam Development Company (ADC) was held at Ebenebe.  The UADC is an organization created by the Community of Umuoba-Anam to manage the community’s interest in the development at Ebenebe.  The Umuoba-Anam community President General (PG), Barrister Nwatah Stan led his group to the secretariat of the ADC.

On arrival at Ebenebe the Council inspected the progress of the New City at the first phase construction site in Ogwuyo.  The Brick Factory was in full operation, the Fish Farm, and the Yam Store (built to replace the traditional yam storage system “oba”), and the affordable Houses and other housing project were under construction.

After the site visit, the Chife Foundation team made a detailed presentation of the state of the New City Project to the UADC, showing images of construction drawings and housing plans. The UADC representatives expressed their gratitude on development so far and also encouraged the Chife Foundation team to achieve as much as possible as to follow the 2011 Master Plan and MOU.

Dr. Chife (CEO of ADC and Chife Foundation founder) joined the meeting for closing words, expressing appreciation for the Development Council’s involvement in the ongoing project. He said he is impressed that the community is beginning to see the reality of the New City and understand the potential for the project.

Who owns a smart city’s intelligence?

Thanks to architect and urban economist Isabel Carreras-Baquer (who participated in the inaugural Anam Rurban Design Workshop), we presented Anam City at the 2011 Smart City Expo in Barcelona, Spain.

The Expo had an incredible line-up of speakers plus exhibition of a host of cutting-edge technologies for intelligent systems at the urban scale.

It also highlights the birth of an emerging business/cult of the ‘smart city,’ with real implications on the future balance of human freedom vis-à-vis the ever-extending reach of corporate power.

The Expo, an industry-driven technological showcase, sought to cross-fertilize the ideas and professional expertise of business leaders, tech researchers and urban policy-makers with the strategic impulse of global technology enterprises hungry for more: more wired cities mean a new market for the hardware and software required to render cities as computational machines.

City as Computer

Who controls these systems? [i.e. operating systems for smart cities]

Control shifts to the firms that sell these systems – some of the functions of local governments pass to the firms that developed these intelligent systems

The interaction between technical systems and the buildings they inhabit: the more complex and all encompassing the system, the more the probability that when the tech becomes obsolete, the buildings lose enormous value and become second-class buildings, and even simply obsolete and are torn down. (Obsolescence cycle is becoming shorter).

– Text of slide from Saskia Sassen’s APC11 keynote at Siège de la région du grand Casablanca

In her keynote at the African Perspectives Conference 2011 in Casablanca, Morocco (where we also presented Anam City), Saskia Sassen proposed that there is a fundamental distinction between “hacking the city” and “the city as hacker.” Sassen argues that while “many non-urban processes now have an urban moment in their trajectories,” the city—which is an incomplete and complex open-source architecture—must be understood as a “knowledge partner.” She labels as “coders” the authors of the city as an intelligent system and equates them to engineers, who prescibe the working mechanism of the urban machine and thereby draw power from (local) governments as they control the systems of control. Ultimately, Sassen locates the space of interactive open-source urbanism in-between this top-down “logic of the engineer” and the bottom-up “logic of the user.” (Francesc Santacana offered a similar assessment during our City Case Study session at the Expo.)

What this means, at a point in time exemplified by the actualization of the urban panopticon – pdf (one CCTV camera for every 12 UK citizens), when mobile phones and credit cards now track users across borders, and as private companies increasingly usurp public authority through the technology-assisted private provision of public services, is that citizens need to be far more aggressively proactive in demanding that they retain the capacity to “hack the city.” The city, fast-approaching self-awareness and always a system unto itself, will continue regardless to hack the society in which it is grounded.

In short, we are hurtling toward science fiction. Within the lifetime of the young people who are leading the #occupy protests world-wide, cities will become vastly more structured urban machines, with operating systems that command huge storage, computational and surveillance data infrastructure. The degree to which corporations control this physical counter-landscape of technology, as well as the expertise to manage it, will determine the extent to which the city remains public. And hackable. (See: #whOWNSpace)

Social Technology

Presenting Anam City at the Expo was particularly interesting because Anam as a project is both related to and also a breed apart from the high tech smart city championed by corporate initiatives like IBM’s Smarter City Challenge. What is new about Anam City is not new technology per se. Rather it is the proposition that combining the myriad intermediate and appropriate technologies already proven over the past half-century—but which remain largely absent across Africa today—together with Nigeria’s mobile web, offers a powerful opportunity to build better, smarter communities. The only way what is in theory eminently viable becomes feasible is by embedding this array of technology in a cultural wrapper that “makes it work.” Anam’s innovation is the socially-embedded simultaneous convergence of the not-new, the iterative process of a community collectively hacking itself.

Anam City Initiatives Highlighted at Columbia University Forum – NYC

November 18, 2011

Anam City’s innovative approach to rural development, community leadership and stakeholder participation was highlighted at Columbia University’s 2011 Africa Diplomatic Forum (ADF). On a panel with high level international affairs officials, Abena Sackey Ojetayo, past Program Manager at the Chife Foundation, discussed the prospects and pitfalls of youth leadership in the future of Africa. The Anam project’s involvement of young people through the Fellows Program and stakeholder focus groups was highlighted as an example of a powerful tool of raising the next generation of leaders in Africa.

The ADF is an annual forum presented by Columbia University’s SIPA Pan-African Network and the Institute of African Studies that brings together African diplomats, academics, activists to discuss development issues on the Continent. This year’s theme, “The Blueprint,” focused on new challenges and opportunities in Africa to develop the right tools and lay the necessary foundation towards sustainable development in light of global political and economic shifts.