Onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, is an infectious disease that is caused by the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus. The infection is transmitted by Simulium blackflies through a bite. It is the second leading infectious disease that results in vision loss. Unlike other diseases, this disease requires repeated bites for an infection to happen. The disease is also called river blindness because the fly breeds in streams and rivers and leads to vision loss. Onchocerciasis is prevailing in remote rural areas which makes those who live or work in these areas more at risk.

Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) are a group of communicable diseases and caused by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites that continuously affect more than 1 billion people globally. Despite ongoing measures, NTDs are still prevalent in vulnerable and low-income countries such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. NTDs are comprised of 20 different medical diseases and mostly target women and children of susceptible communities.

If you have created educational audio content for your community, you will most likely want to disseminate it among your beneficiaries. Ideally, you do this through communication channels such as WhatsApp. However, in some cases it is useful to use printed materials such as posters or stickers to distribute a specific internet address where people can access the audio information you created.

Because of women’s unique biological characteristics and unequal cultural and social status, they are exposed to various reproductive and maternal health problems. In the past decades, the health situation of Sub-Saharan African women has improved significantly but it still lags behind that of other countries. For example, during the period from 2000 to 2017, Sub-Saharan Africa achieved a reduction of 39 percent of maternal mortality (from 870 to 533 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births). However, it still accounts for 68 percent of all maternal deaths per year worldwide (Unicef Data 2020).

As in many other developing countries, there are hardly any trained professionals for mental health care in Rwanda. Especially for people living in poverty or far away from urban centres, there is therefore no or hardly any suitable help. As a rule, many mentally ill people cannot be adequately supported.

Education has always been entwined with class, gender, and ethnicity. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than Sub-Saharan Africa. According to a UNICEF study, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Senegal, Cameroon, Benin, Niger, and Rwanda are the countries that spend the smallest percentage of public education spending on the poorest households. All of these countries spend 10% or less on educating the poorest households while dedicating 30% to 50% of their public education funds to the wealthiest households.

Leprosy is still a thing. The number of new cases reported globally to the World Health Organization in 2019 was more than 200,000. An estimated 2 to 3 million people are living with leprosy-related disabilities globally. In 2019, the countries with the highest number of new diagnoses were India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Over half of all new cases of leprosy are diagnosed in India, which remains home to a third of the world’s poor, a group disproportionately affected by the disease.

Many organizations and governments seek to achieve female empowerment through education. Although it is not the only means of achieving it nor the only one stakeholders should be focusing on, it is certainly an important aspect of female empowerment and a powerful tool for change, especially because it allows women to gain access to knowledge that will help them in the agency processes that play a big role in empowering women (Kabeer 2005, 16).

Using your own audio messages in combination with Audiopedia's content can be a good idea if you want to build a digital community outreach for your NGO. In combination with WhatsApp, it can become quite a powerful tool.

Gender-based violence in Sub-Saharan Africa is a large issue that has not yet been adequately addressed. According to the UN, women in sub-Saharan Africa are at greater risk of intimate partner violence than in most other regions of the world.