Nominated by: Marie-Heleen Coetzee
Carol Hofmeyr is founder of a unique educational delivery system that integrates the arts, health care, and educational programs to reach remote, poverty-stricken and HIV-ridden regions of South Africa. In collaboration with teachers, students and community leaders, Carol’s system has helped over 20,000 villagers and teachers to acquire career and self-reliance skills as well as enhance economic development.
In 2000, fine artist and medical doctor, Carol Hofmeyr, moved to Hamburg, where extreme poverty, alcoholism, lack of self-esteem and poor health were prevalent. The Keiskamma Trust was set up in 2003–initially to teach art and to make artworks that allowed the villagers a means of self-expression–and to find ways in which local women could earn money. The project expanded rapidly. By 2004, a health program assisted the many local people who were HIV positive. In 2012, Carol’s innovations in the field of health education were recognized by the Royal College of Physicians, which in 2013, awarded her an honorary fellowship, and by Rhodes University, which conferred an honorary doctorate on her.
