ASRU fellow Peter Navario has graduated with a doctorate titled "Implementation of a novel model to boost routine HIV care and treatment capacity in South Africa: outcomes, costs, and cost-effectiveness". In the photo he is seen with Director of ASRU, Prof Nicoli Nattrass, who was also his supervisor. Details on the research is provided below.

Implementation of a novel model to boost routine HIV care and treatment capacity in South Africa: outcomes, costs, and cost-effectiveness

Introduction This research evaluated a novel public-private partnership (PPP) between the provincial department of health, an NGO, and a local private sector general practitioner (GP)  network, which provides routine HIV care and treatment to public sector patients in order to alleviate the patient burden at public sector primary care clinics.

The CSSR hosted a two-day workshop on 7-8 May as part of a Princeton-based series of workshops on state-building in the developing world. Participants from Princeton included Atul Kohli, Miguel Centeno and Deborah Yashar. Jeremy Seekings was the local host, and Bob Mattes and Mike Morris presented papers on aspects of the South African state.
Other participants included Mike Bratton, Raufu Mustapha, Thandika Mkandawire, Antoinette Handley, Deborah Posel and Peter Lewis.

The Centre for Social Science Research/Democracy in Africa Research Unit (DARU) stand was easily identified by large posters illustrating the work done in the three areas of DARU research on the continent. Research findings from the African Legislatures Project, the Afrobarometer and the Aids and Governance Research Project and a selection of working papers were available for visitors to look at and take away.

Co-principal investigators for the African Legislatures Project Prof Bob Mattes and Prof Joel D. Barkan took part in an exciting and well attended Panel Discussion with Dr Somadoda Fikeni and Prof Kwesi Prah, chaired by DVC Prof Thandabantu Nhlapo, on The State of Democracy in Africa: Advance or Retreat?

Prof Barkan’s presentation included preliminary findings from the African Legislatures Project 20-country study, and Prof Mattes spoke about findings on how Africans view democracy.

Study in the CSSR, see the world!  CSSR students will be travelling widely over coming months. Singumbe Muyeba and Carlos Shenge have fully-funded places on a summer school in June at Brown University, in the USA, on "Development and Inequality in the Global South". The CSSR is one of the international partners of Brown University's Watson Institute, and we look forward to sending many more students to Brown in future.

Kai Thaler and Rutendo Murambiwa have fully-funded places on a summer school to be held in July in Olympia, in Greece, on research methods in the study of conflict. The summer school is supported by the "Microcon" research consortium on the microfoundations of violent conflict, in which the CSSR is a partner.

Finally, Ed Grebe has followed in the footsteps of previous CSSR-based students Brendan Maughan-Brown and Colin Almeleh in winning a prestigious Fox Fellowship, allowing him to spend the 2010-11 academic year at Yale University in the USA. Congratulations to all five of our students!

The Centre for Social Science Research's annual report for 2009 has been released. It, and earlier reports, can be downloaded on the Annual Reports page.

It includes the annual reports for each of the research units within the CSSR.

We are pleased to announce the release of the first episode of the CSSR Research Podcast series. This episode is in audio only (MP3 and OGG/Vorbis formats), but we plan to include videos in future. You can download the audio files manually or subscribe by pasting the URLs given below into your podcasting client. 

The first episode is a recording of a panel discussion titled What heals? Different approaches to medicine in South Africa with Prof Paula Ensor (Dean: Humanities, University of Cape Town), Prof Nicoli Nattrass (Director: ASRU), Dr Deborah Posel (Institute for Humanities in Africa) and Mr Nathan Geffen (Author: Debunking Delusions and ASRU fellow).

MP3 feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CSSRPodcastMP3 or subscribe in iTunes.

OGG feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CSSRPodcastOGG

ALP Research Associates in MaseruIn October 2009, ALP Lesotho Research Associates met for a five-day ALP Induction and Orientation workshop led by Tim Hughes (ALP Lesotho co-Manager) and Kimberly Smiddy (ALP Senior Research Associate) at the Black Swan Lodge in Maseru, Lesotho. Thabo Mosoeunyane, Setsabi Setsabi, Seroala Tsoeu-Ntokoane and Maseqobela Mohale are conducting ALP research in Lesotho with Prof.

Prof Jeremy Seekings, director of the SSU, was recently interviewed on his research for "The MacMillan Report" of the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Video courtesy of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

Prof Nicoli Nattrass, director of ASRU, was recently interviewed on her research for "The MacMillan Report" of the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Video courtesy of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

ASRU director, Prof Nicoli Nattrass, this week presented preliminary research on denialist beliefs among young South Africans at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her analysis is based on the Cape Area Panel Study which is a major survey conducted by the Centre for Social Science Research in partnership with Michigan State University. The results show a relationship between trust in former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and denialist beliefs among respondents. Prof Nattrass has previously published on former President Mbeki's AIDS denialism in her book Mortal Combat and has published estimates of the number of deaths caused by the failure to provide antiretroviral treatment.

Update: A video of the event can now be viewed here.

The Harvard Gazette reports:

Nicoli Nattrass, director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit and economics professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, presented preliminary results from a large-scale study of teenagers and young adults there. The results, which are still being analyzed, show that denialist beliefs are held disproportionately by black African men and are far more likely to be held by those supportive of Mbeki’s health minister, who has been replaced by the current administration.

Recent research showed how damaging denialist beliefs can be, concluding that Mbeki’s failure to roll out HIV drugs between 2000 and 2005 resulted in 330,000 unnecessary deaths and the infection of 3,500 infants with HIV.

Photo by Justin Ide, Harvard Staff Photographer.

The website for the African Legislatures Project (ALP), co-managed by DARU, has been launched. The purpose of ALP is both simple and grand—to learn everything important there is to know about how African legislatures function. As such, ALP is an exercise that straddles the realms of academic research and practice – in this case, research into the operations of the legislature and what its findings suggest for African parliaments, organisations working in legislative and democratic reform and supportive donor agencies. If you wish to learn more about ALP, visit the new project website.

Jeremy Seekings is co-convenor of the first Urban Studies School being held under the auspices of Research Committee 21 of the International Sociology Association and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), in Sao Paulo, between 17 and 25 August 2009. This School - a Winter School in the Southern Hemisphere, but a Summer School from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere - will bring together twenty-five young researchers from around the world and a team of senior urban scholars, to address a variety of topics in urban studies.  See further http://www.shakti.uniurb.it/rc21/.

The latest issue of the African Journal of AIDS Research (8,2, 2009) includes two articles by CSSR researchers.  Rene Brandt (ASRU) reviews existing studies of the mental health of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. Rachel Bray (SSU) analyses ethnographic data from a Cape Town township on how HIV-positive or AIDS-sick women make decisions about where to live, with whom, and where their children should live. See:

Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings are part of an international research collaboration on state-business relations for the project on Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth (IPPG). The IPPG project explores the proposition that political and social institutions have a direct bearing on economic institutions and thereby on economic growth and distribution. Nattrass and Seekings are conducting a South African case study of how state-business relations are shaped by the historical growth path and by labour-market institutions inherited from the past, but which nevertheless are strongly influenced by policy changes (notably black economic empowerment). They argue that South Africa's growth path will only become 'pro-poor' when institutional changes are made to facilitate a more labour-demanding growth path. This, however, would require compromises from organised labour.

Delegates at the workshopASRU researcher Eduard Grebe helped organise a workshop of AIDS activists from Southern Africa, Ukraine, India, China and Mexico as part of the aids2031 initiative's Leadership Working Group. ASRU has also conducted background research on leadership in the AIDS response for aids2031.