How many Africans?
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I am a newcomer to afro-nets but, in the few weeks that I have been a
subscriber, only a tiny proportion of contributions seem to have come
from Africa and most of these have been from ex-pats. Most contribu-
tions are apparently from the US, India and Hungary. No doubt afro-nets
is a useful forum for people interested in healthcare in far-off lands
but to what extent is it providing a useful service to those on the
front-line of service provision in Africa?
I would be very interested to know how many subscribers afro-nets has
and how many of these subscribers are in Africa.
My own particular interest is that I am Editor of a journal called
AFRICA HEALTH which is sent free of charge six times a year to nearly
6000 readers in Africa, most of them physicians. (Most of these 6000
subscribers are kind enough to let their colleagues see their copies so
our 'pass-on' readership is several times higher.) Many of our readers
have told us they see no other healthcare information these days, so we
like to think we are playing a key role in HI provision in Africa. In
particular, our approximately 1000 readers in Ethiopia seem to lack
other information sources; the various other HI publications one would
expect them to receive (e.g. from AHRTAG) seem not to get through.
We have only a handful of readers outside the African continent - about
200.
On the rare occasions that we have published anything referring to com-
puters, IT etc., readers have told us not to waste precious pages on
such matters, as most of them have no access to computers. Indeed many
readers have limited access to electricity. I also note that, although
I receive many letters from readers, I have almost never received a
reader's letter by email.
Perhaps Africa Health can help those subscribers to afro-nets who have
information they would like to communicate to healthcare workers on the
front-line, since the majority of these workers are not Internet (or
even computer) users. If anyone would like to contact me about this
please do so.
Paul Chinnock
Editor, Africa Health
FSG MediMedia
Vine House, Fair Green, Reach,
Cambridge CB5 0JD, UK
Tel: +44-1638-743-633
Fax: +44-1638-743-998
mailto:paul@fsg.co.uk
--
Dear Paul,
thanks for your observation. Though it is a bit biased regarding the
countries of origin of the contributions (we have rarely something from
India) it is true that messages originating in Africa are the minority.
At the moment we have about 600 direct subscribers, more than half of
them from the African continent. In some African countries messages are
fed into a local HealthNet conference (mostly also called AFRO-NETS)
and also distributed locally.
A similar discussion came up in May last year:
African participation in AFRO-NETS 970531131120
African participation in AFRO-NETS (2) 970531143743
African participation in AFRO-NETS (3) 970601023526
African participation in AFRO-NETS (4) 970601133635
African participation in AFRO-NETS (5) 970601133632
African participation in AFRO-NETS (6) 970601133627
African participation in AFRO-NETS (7) 970602141129
African participation in AFRO-NETS (8) 970602164428
You can request any of these messages by sending an e-mail to:
majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
leave the 'Subject line' empty and in the body of the message type:
get afro-nets 970531131120
end
(i.e. for the first message. If you want all of them type one after the
other, leaving an empty line between them and finishing with 'end':
get afro-nets 970531131120
get afro-nets 970531143743
.......
end
Several proposals were made to aggressively push Africans to make use
of the new medium but I doubt whether that is the right approach. What
we do is to show people at every occasion how useful e-mail can be, how
easy it is to use and we are not keeping quiet about problems and pit-
falls.
With AFRO-NETS we try to offer a service but we hove no means to force
people to contribute. Perhaps AFRICA HEALTH could assist in spreading
the message.
The opinion of our subscribers is highly appreciated.
Dieter Neuvians
AFRO-NETS Moderator
mailto:neuvians@harare.iafrica.com
--
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