PHILANI: IMPROVING HEALTH IN POOR COUNTRIES Joan Needham and Kate Somers SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2007 This photography exhibition tells the story of one health care model in South Africa. The Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Project is a community-based health and nutrition nongovernmental organization operating in the overcrowded and unsanitary settlements outside Cape Town, where 750,000 people live in makeshift dwellings without water or basic services. They have widespread unemployment, concentrated poverty, high rates of HIV/AIDS, extensive malnutrition and poor health. Since 1979, under Founder/Director Dr. Ingrid le Roux, Philani has been assisting thousands of mothers, pregnant women and children through a network of community outreach workers and nutrition centers and an income-generating art and craft program. Joan D. Needham’s career as an arts educator spans more than 36 years and includes Artworks in Trenton, The Princeton Art Association, The Trenton After School Program, and 36 years as a professor of art at Mercer County Community College. Needham is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship and is part of the New Jersey Public Arts Program. The artist has exhibited her paintings, works on paper and sculpture locally and internationally throughout the United States, Japan, China, Spain, England, Beijing and France. Her public art includes a lobby installation at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, New Jersey. Needham earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Katherine A. Somers has been an independent consultant in the fine arts since 1995. She is currently curator for the Bernstein Gallery at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and has been a consultant to the Princeton University Art Museum in Campus Arts and to the Borough of Princeton on public art. She earned a master’s and bachelor’s degree, respectively, in art history from Rutgers University and George Washington University. Panel: “Improving Health in Poor Countries: What Works?”
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Panelists include: Dr. Ingrid le Roux, director, Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Project, South Africa; Professor Christina Paxson, director, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Angus Deaton, professor of economics and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Moderator: Anne C. Case, professor of economics and public affairs and director, Research Program in Development Studies, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Khayelitsha, South Africa, 2007”