Africa Research Institute (ARI) is an independent not-for-profit think-tank that was founded in February 2007. It is the only think-tank in the UK to focus exclusively on political, economic and social issues in sub-Saharan Africa. ARI strives to inform domestic and international policy making through publishing research and hosting interactive events.ARI's mission is to draw attention to ideas or policies that have worked in Africa by highlighting and analysing best-practices in government, the economy and civil society. ARI encourages debate and challenges conventional wisdom in and about sub-Saharan Africa. It seeks to provide a nuanced and representative understanding of the region, as opposed to conventional “binary” depictions that often dominate the Western media.The organisation has published work on urbanisation, political and institutional reform, regional integration, health and agriculture, amongst other issues..
The Oued Souf Valley in southern Algeria, part of the vast Sahara, is confronting a severe groundwater crisis driven by overexploitation, human-induced pollution, and climate variability. This study presents an extensive assessment of hydrochemical, bacteriological, and heavy metal contamination across three major aquifers: the shallow phreatic, complex terminal, and continental intercalary aquifers. Results from 58 monitoring wells and detailed sample analyses reveal alarming contamination levels in the phreatic aquifer, with electrical conductivity up to 7500 μS/cm, nitrate concentrations exceeding 150 mg/L, and high levels of aluminum, lead, and manganese. All phreatic samples showed very high pollution levels based on the Groundwater Pollution Index (GPI). Spatial analysis linked contamination patterns to intensive agriculture and urban expansion. Deeper aquifers displayed lower contamination but still frequently exceeded WHO standards for drinking water and irrigation due to high salinity and mineralization. Health risk assessments revealed hazard index (HI) values exceeding 1 for adults in 8 samples and for children in all samples, highlighting significant risks from long-term exposure to metals. Geostatistical modeling showed fluctuating groundwater levels between 2008 and 2021, driven by human activity and infrastructure failures. While ecological risk from heavy metals was generally low, localized samples showed considerable or high risk, especially due to lead contamination. The findings underscore the urgent need for integrated water management, stricter pollution controls, improved infrastructure, and targeted public health interventions to safeguard this vulnerable region’s water resources and its population’s health.
Small-scale gold mining sustains millions of people's lives and yet it stimulates environmental harms and social conflicts. Global environmental crises drive calls for fundamental change to how people live on the planet. For small-scale gold mining, this raises questions about whether current dynamics can provide a basis for sustainability transformations. Proposing the notion of gold lifeways to focus on the lived experience of mining and gold resources as relational phenomena, we ask what sustainability looks like from different miners' perspectives and probe the practice dynamics of current transformation. Our methodology is social science-led and transdisciplinary. From multi-sited and trans-regional research between South America and Africa, we draw cases from Suriname, Guinea Conakry, and Uganda. Our study finds that gold lifeways give expression to different strands of sustainability: sustaining everyday life in mining; discourses framing mining practices; and government repression of mining. Hence, as our empirical data demonstrates, miner perspectives on sustainability gain content not in isolation, but as part of gold lifeways embedded within different contexts and shaped by societal dynamics. Ultimately, the transformative potency of small-scale gold mining is located in personal lives and precarious dynamics rather than glittering promises of a sustainable future.
Mobile messaging apps and SMS-based tools have been deployed to extend healthcare services beyond the clinic; peer support chat groups, consisting of patients and healthcare providers, can improve medication adherence. However, moderation can be burdensome for busy healthcare professionals who must respond to patients, provide accurate and timely information, and engage and build community among patients. In this paper, taking an ethnographic approach, we examine the moderation of chat groups for young people living with HIV in Kenya. We describe the roles and responsibilities of the moderator while striving to engage and build community among the participants and manage the group chat, highlighting the challenges they face. Grounded in the moderators' work, we explore how an LLM-enabled copilot could help or hinder group facilitation. In doing so, we contribute to discussions about the potential of Artificial Intelligence in supporting healthcare professionals.
Research connecting the 'Global South' and 'Global North' is not new to HCI. However, over the last few years we have seen a prominent shift in the ways we understand, represent and engage in North-South collaborations. Central to these discussions is the need to re-frame the nature of collaboration between and across geographies in which power dynamics, coloniality and the handling of differences are at the fore. In this panel, we will discuss experiences of HCI collaboration across the 'Global South' and 'Global North'. The panel will unpack the joys, fluidity and tensions within such collaborations from various geographical perspectives, in an effort to de-homogenize the Global South, and provide ways forward for an HCI flavored re-articulation of collaboration across geo-politically established and epistemic borders.
In this panel, we follow up on conversations that have been happening around hybrid environments, conducted in open sessions by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Executive Committee (EC), at SIGs at CHI 2022 and CHI 2023 and on twitter, facebook, medium and similar media. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift to virtual conferences. As we go back to in-person events, it is important to reflect on what we have learned about these configurations, the types of events we desire, and how hybrid intersects with SIGCHI values such as increased accessibility, sustainability and inclusion. With this panel, we expect to engage the CSCW community in the discussion of what lies beyond the current in-person format, the possibilities created by the hybrid and what other innovations might further these values.
