During a recent visit to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Cape I was able to meet with the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and senior members of the School of Nursing faculty. I am pleased to be able to report their deep interest in the project and their eagerness to collaborate in these efforts to build the capacity of clinical nurses at PEHC, most of whom received their nurse training at NMMU. In addition, I had a very fruitful meeting with the head of health informatics for the Eastern Cape Department of Health, who is very enthusiastic about building on this information dissemination project the functionality needed to use the system for the collection and reporting of vital public health information (including disease surveillance).

Significantly, a major developer of communications software and systems, has just granted us $100,000 to implement the first stage of the proposed project in Port Elizabeth. With this contribution, we now have sufficient committed funds to begin the project in earnest, and we are in the process of scheduling a stakeholders meeting in Port Elizabeth in early March 2008.

We still need to raise funds from the individuals and corporations who use GlobalGiving to help us achieve our goal of building the capacity of clinical nurses in South Africa.