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CAPFSA - Children and Injuries Conference
The Child Accident Prevention Foundation of Southern Africa (CAPFSA), together with its partners, will host the annual Conference of the International Society for Violence and Injury Prevention in Cape Town, from the 31st August to the 3rd September 2008, at the University of Cape Town.
For full details, download CAPFSA’s 2nd announcement.
“Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being…”
- Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, Ch2. Section 24
Add your voice of support to the Paraffin Users’ Declaration!
See the Consumer Rights Campaign page for instructions on how you can make a difference!
New research provides insight into domestic energy safety
Two research articles have recently been published; the first analyses the impact safe paraffin appliances have on demand side management, and the second dispells the various myths surrounding domestic energy use. Both papers are available for download on the research page.
Paraffin Users’ Household Energy Summit Declaration
Paraffin Users at three regional and one national household energy summit drafted a declaration about household energy and household energy safety. The Paraffin Safety Association was mandated to speak on behalf of paraffin users to all relevant government departments; and to take the deliberations of the summits and ensure they are included in the Department of Minerals and Energy’s Integrated Household Energy plan.
Click on the image above to view the Declaration
Welcome to our website
Welcome to our newly designed website. We are continually improving our website for ease of access and effective communication. We want the website to be user friendly and relevant. The re-launch of our website comes at a very exciting time at the Paraffin Safety Association.
This website has been setup with a few basic aims in mind:
- To account – to show what the Paraffin Safety Association has been doing to make the use (consumption) of paraffin (kerosene) safer
- To be a knowledge repository about household energy, and paraffin in particular, as it relates to low income households
- To lobby – to draw attention to the need to act and how to act in order to improve the quality of life of low income householders.
Imagine an informal housing structure, a confined space filled with flammable materials and hazardous substances. Add to it a naked flame. For the health and safety officer, the danger alarm bells will start to ring in their minds. But if you crowd into this picture some untrained and underage personnel, many of whom cannot read, and they will be thinking that you now have a recipe for a horrible incident at the very best.
If, on top of this, there are no standard operating practices, fundamentally unsafe equipment and systems; they will surely determine that you are looking at a catastrophic disaster at worst.
Now add some “act of God” like a strong South Easterly wind and the catastrophe has the potential to spread rapidly to the surrounding structures.
This is what makes the lack of provision of safe, affordable energy systems for low income households such a travesty and why it is so important for the players who can make a difference to get together and make that difference.