Vimbai Hungwe was the President of AHILA, the Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa, and Senior Programme Officer at ITOCA, the Information Technology Outreach Centre for Africa. He died tragically in a road accident on Sunday, 6 June 2010 in Pretoria.
Before joining ITOCA, Vimbai played a pivotal co-ordination role in the provision of agricultural information to the Agricultural Research Centres falling under Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Agriculture and gained firsthand experience about the constraints faced by researchers in Africa.
At the pan-African Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe, he helped set up the agriculture and health collection, and was heavily involved with training in the use of e-resources for research, learning and teaching. He joined ITOCA in 2004 and was involved in planning, organizing and conducting workshops, as well as in implementing outreach and support for the WHO Research4Life programmes, TEEAL and PROTA.
He was a vital, leading champion of health information in Africa, and his passing is a cruel and untimely loss for the global health-information community on whom he had such a positive and inspiring impact during his career.
Jane Kinney Meyers has been involved with libraries and information for international development in Malawi, Zambia and other African countries.
She developed a network of research libraries for Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture in the mid-1980s, and pioneered CD-ROM applications for Africa. Ten years later, she returned to neighbouring Zambia, where she established a reading programme, served on the Board, raised funds, and created an informal library for street children. She saw dramatic social and educational benefits among the street children who used the library, and this inspired a plan to build full-service, public-access libraries for street kids, orphans and other vulnerable children and youths.
On her return to the USA in 2001, she developed the concept, approach and organization of the Lubuto Library Project, based on the success and impact of the library in Lusaka. The first Lubuto Library opened in 2007 and the second is expected to open in September 2010.
Jane is a dynamic librarian whose professional ideas about building libraries with the support and assistance of African governments have had a positive impact on some of the world’s most vulnerable children and youths.
Focus 40 (1) March 2009 (pdf 711KB) includes, on pages 4 - 8 an article Jane Kenney Meyers wrote for ILIG.
Previous ILIG International Award winners