Keeping young hearts beating — that’s the mission of the Heart and Stroke Foundation South Africa’s Children’s Programme, a community-based empowerment project that teaches healthy habits from a young age. With the help of sponsorship from Lucky Star, the foundation has been able to extend its reach beyond the metropolitan precincts and into the rural areas.

Providing palliative care for patients who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness calls for special levels of devotion and compassion — qualities offered by Ladybrand Hospice in the Free State. The hospice provides relief from suffering and distress when illness has reached the stage where continued medical treatment can no longer provide a cure. Patients are assigned a home-based carer.

Repairing cleft lips and palates of children from disadvantaged communities is one of the specialised services offered by Johannesburg’s Netcare Park Lane Hospital, which has earned international recognition for the facilities it offers to mothers and infants.

South Africa’s presidency presented a challenge to Stellenbosch University towards the end of 2000 — to develop a programme that addresses the HIV/Aids pandemic. So was born the postgraduate diploma in the management of HIV/Aids, which has now been accepted as a model for the African continent.

Lack of qualified human resources in the African healthcare arena continues to hinder poverty reduction and development, opening up further potential for computer-based learning models on the continent. A case in point is Kenya, where almost 90% of the country’s nurses are trained at the lowest “enrolled” status.

One in every 100 children suffers from congenital heart defects – and as many as 95% of these can be treated through surgery, enabling them to go on to live normal lives. But without treatment, these children die within weeks. Less than 30% of indigent South African children and 1% of children in the rest of the continent can afford the treatment they need.

Absa’s social investments stand in the context of its wider role in all the societies in which it operates. The Absa Healthcare Initiative Awards, to be held for the second time this year, are a major component of the 2007 Pan-African Health Congress.