New Community Eye Health Newsletter!
The aim is to publish 3 issues per year.
The newsletter is sent via email to national eye care coordinators of African countries, NGOs that do eye development work in Africa and every person who have previously completed training with us since 2005. This number is now more than 100 in 24 African countries! The newsletter is also available in print format and under the "Resources" tab on the CEHI website.
The idea is to encourage the practice of telling success stories of eye care programme staff at implementation level. This will serve to improve communications amongst eye workers across the continent, with the benefit of more effective networking, better sharing of best practices and learning from each other. We hope that this will help to motivate ground level staff to do their work with more energy and pride. It may also help to "advertise" their good works to decision-makers higher up in government and funding agencies. Overall, we believe that this will contribute to develop human resource capacity in an interesting and systematic manner.
Another benefit of the newsletter, is that it will encourage eye care staff to write. This can be either to record accounts of their accomplishments or for inspiring an academic writing culture. There are not enough articles about community eye health appearing in peer review journals. Writing for CEH-iNews may be the first step to change this.
All ex-students of CEHI network are invited to submit stories of their achievements for publication. It is known that staff who read about their work, and know that others read about it too are more motivated than those who do not.