Oxfam campaigner Push is in South Africa to find out how the Fair Play for Africa campaign is encouraging health care across Africa.

Today is the start of South Africa’s World Cup. It’s also a massively busy time for the Fair Play for Africa campaign. A campaign made up of more than 200 organisations across ten African countries; Angola, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The goal is health for all: improving health care across the continent, especially for the most vulnerable - women, children and people living with HIV and AIDS. The key to this is ensuring that African governments finance health care in a transparent and accountable way. This means spending 15% of national budgets on healthcare and being open about what this money is used for. We’re calling on governments to ensure that

money is invested in training more health workers, investing in maternal care and educating people about health issues.

I’ve come to South Africa at a massively exciting time for the country (and continent) and a critical time for the campaign. The whistling and the vuvezela playing - if you don’t know what they are yet, you’ll find out over the next few weeks - by my colleagues as I arrived got me straight into the festival spirit.

The Fair Play team is small but they’ve managed to kick up a real storm over the last three months. They’ve met, informed and energised 500 African Union/Pan-African parliamentarians; actively led and worked with 3,000 people when Liverpool FC came to South Africa; launched the Fair Play campaign in eight of the ten focus countries; and reached more than 10,000 people across the continent. There was a very impressive launch in Zambia, where the health minister endorsed and appreciated the work of Fair Play. They’re now getting ready for a day of action on 18 June.

“So much energy and so much media coverage in Zambia,” gushed Love Daliah, campaign coordinator for Fair Play, after the Zambia launch.

I’ll let you know what we get up to over the next few weeks as we keep energising and inspiring people to take action to put pressure on African leaders to deliver health care for their people.

More ways Oxfam is using the World Cup to inspire people to get involved

Tags: Fair Play for Africa, HIV / AIDS, Zambia

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 4.41 pm and is filed under Campaigns, Campaigns Blog, Campaigns News, News Blog, You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.