Funding for demographic studies
The project will help researchers better understand how poverty, inequality and unemployment impacts South Africans’ lives
THE Department of Science and Technology has granted the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) funding to help set up what will be the continent’s largest demographic studies project.
Called the South African Network of Health and Demographic Surveillance Sites (HDSS), the study will be an integrated national platform for population data collection and analysis.
This first major project for the newly-formed orginisation will have AHRI scientists, the Wits School of Public Health and the University of Limpopo working together to establish a groundbreaking national data collection and research initiative.
The project will link, integrate and standardise AHRI’s Population Intervention Platform in uMkhanyakude with the MRC/ Wits Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System in Bushbuckridge and the University of Limpopo’s Dikgale site.
The three programmes have detailed longitudinal (across time) data on a collective population of more than 250 000 people.
A new rural site is planned for the Eastern Cape, as well as new urban population research nodes in Gauteng, eThekwini and the Western Cape.
Data range A broad range of data will be gathered from individuals and households, with information including residence status and migration, to household dynamics to employment and disease monitoring, complemented by government records on health systems, school attendance and social grants.
The project will help researchers better understand how poverty, inequality and unemployment impacts South Africans’ lives, how to design better interventions, and is one of 13 projects that make up the Department of Science and Technology’s South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap, a strategic intervention to provide research infrastructure across the entire public research system.
‘We want to study the determinants of ill health and how this then affects the population as a whole,’ said, AHRI deputy director and HDSS champion, Dr Kobus Herbst.
‘With regard to the causes, we aim to disentangle the precise contribution of poverty, unemployment and mobility/migration to disease.
‘At the same time we can measure how government policies aiming to alleviate some of these factors can actually improve health, what policies work well or less so, and how can such interventions be improved.’
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