In hopes of preventing such tragedies, the Kwa Mashu Community Advancement Project (K-CAP) will be training 15 to 20 youth from the township in the upcoming months to become citizen journalists reporting on local health issues, particularly those related to HIV/AIDS. Roughly 5.7 million people in South Africa are living with HIV and 350,000 people died of the disease last year. This project is one of the six new health-focused citizen media outreach projects that were announced in June by Rising Voices and Open Society Institute’s Health Media Initiative.

Edmund Mhlongo, the project's leader, explains the inspiration for this project:

K-CAP is a community based organization in Kwa Mashu Township, where HIV/AIDS is highest. Some K-CAP members are HIV/AIDS positive and there is a lot of silence and stigma about HIV/AIDS positive people – hence the importance of this project.

Kwa Mashu, a township north of Durban, is the largest and older of the three townships in the area. It was formed by the apartheid state, which separated people according to their race, in 1958. The film, Still My Home, is being made in conjunction with K-CAP and looks at the history of this township. Mhlongo further describes his community:

It is one of the poorest areas in Durban where the unemployment rate amongst youth is estimated to be about 60 percent. The township has a population of between 800,000 and one million people. There are still many people staying in informal settlements surrounding Kwa Mashu. Kwa Mashu itself is a wonderful place with lots of energetic people full of life and positive about the new South Africa. The new government is in the process of developing Kwa Mashu as a better place.

K-CAP, which operates out of the Ekhaya Multi-Arts Centre, has been playing an active role in trying to make Kwa Mashu a better place since it was founded in October 1993. The organization strives to empower disadvantaged youth by teaching them integrated arts and multimedia skills, which increase the youth's knowledge and career opportunities and hopefully encourages them to make more positive life changes. The organization runs five integrated arts programs for about 300 youth who are mostly in their teens (ages 12 to 23). Through these programs they produce a quarterly print newsletter called Just Don't, which is distributed to 10,000 youth in Kwa Mashu's schools, and run an annual film festival, which features youth-produced documentaries.

It is in their Ekhaya Imagination Lab, where young people are taught multimedia skills, that K-CAP will train 15 to 20 youth to become citizen journalists covering local health issues such as HIV/AIDS. The Lab hasn't used blogs or podcasts in the past, with many youth using MySpace to share their stories instead. However, this new project will allow for the use of more forms of multimedia, as the youth will be taught how to blog about health issues and be encouraged to post their stories online. Mhlongo says they hope to create a special Web site to post these stories. The stories will be featured in K-CAP's newsletter as well. The youth will also use multimedia to create posters on HIV/AIDS and to develop short animations about breaking the silence of HIV/AIDS.

It is hoped that this project will help raise awareness about HIV/AIDS among the youth of Kwa Mashu, encourage discussion about the issue, help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS by providing access to appropriate information, and help break down barriers. Mhlongo says there are real barriers to lowering HIV rates in Kwa Mashu.

There is still a fear of the unknown where youth are scared to even do testing, let alone talk about their status. Only female youth who get pregnant get tested for HIV and nobody knows the real status of HIV positive males in Kwa Mashu and in South Africa generally.

However, he adds that citizen media may be one of the best vehicles for getting the youth in the community to talk openly about HIV/AIDS and hopefully combat the fears and stigma surrounding the disease.

Many youth today have access to Internet and it is becoming a powerful communication tool – easier to use and send messages direct. Not many people know the challenges faced by youth in Kwa Mashu on issues relating to HIV/AIDS.

The youth at K-CAP are currently being familiarized with the use of computers and the Internet. Next the media tutors will teach them how to use cameras, so they can capture images that also tell their stories.

In Brasov, Romania, the Casa Sperantei hospice center will train its nurses, doctors, and staff how to use audio and video recording equipment to share the direct stories of patients with life-threatening illnesses. The center's staff will also take advantage of their online media training and interactive website to explain the objectives, successes, and challenges in palliative care, which focuses on improving end-of-life care for patients and their families, with a special focus on vulnerable populations including the elderly, children, and patients with cancer or HIV/AIDS.

In the township of Kwa Mashu, on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa, the Kwa Mashu Community Advancement Project (K-CAP) will use its Ekhaya Imagination Lab to train 20 new citizen journalists from within the township how to report on local stories related to local health issues affecting the community. In 1998 Gugu Dlamini was stoned to death in Kwa Mashu after publicly declaring her positive HIV status. The twenty citizen journalists trained at K-CAP will aim to counter such severe stigma to HIV and AIDS while also bringing local health issues to an international audience.

Pavel Kutsev of the Drop-in Center will use blog posts, photos, podcasts, and online video to share his experiences working at a harm reduction facility based in Kyiv, Ukraine. The blog will open a window to the daily reality of drug users and describe how that reality affects public health throughout the country.

The Orizonturi Foundation in Campulung Moldovenesc, Romania will create a blogging club for mental health service users which trains them how to maintain a weblog, upload videos to online sharing sites, and use social networks. The technical skills will enable the participants to share their own stories and forge their own online identities.

In Brazzaville, Congo the AZUR Development organization, as part of its AIDS Network Africa initiative, will “train communication officers of local AIDS organizations in digital story telling, podcasting, and the creation of blogs to document the stigma and discrimination of people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS in Congo in order to use them as a tool for advocacy, education, and the promotion rights of people infected with HIV.” Each communication officer will describe how the AIDS pandemic is currently affecting the local community where he or she works and what daily life is like for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Last, but not least, the FrontAIDS project based in St. Petersburg, Russia will use citizen media to monitor accessibility to treatment for people living with HIV, AIDS, hepatitis, and TB in 20 regions around Russia. The interactive blog-based site will become a an aggregator and go-to resource of citizen media information related to health issues around Russia.

The six projects are diverse in their geography and their strategic approach, but they all share a desire to train health activists to use new media in order spread awareness about their work and the communities they serve.