Africa's health workforce is facing a crisis. Millions within the sub-Saharan region of Africa face suffering and preventable or treatable diseases, because they are unable to obtain proper medical care from trained workers. Africa bears 1/4 of the burden of disease around the world and barely has 3% of all health workers. According to McKinsey consulting the region would require an additional 820,000 doctors and nurses to provide the population with the most basic of health services. This means that the region's countries would have to increase the size of their health workforce by a staggering 140%

Unfortunately the resources to hire, train and sustain that level of increase is not expected in the foreseeable future, and much worse, even if the funding was to materialize, an additional 600 medical and nursing schools would be required to fill the current gap. McKinsey has estimated that it would take more than two decades to train the number of needed professionals. However McKinsey also takes a look at ways in which Africa could close its healthcare gap.

Another event I wish I could go to, where geography becomes the defining limitation. MIT's Convergence Culture
Consortium is hosting an event on Futures of Entertainment 2.

Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications.This year's conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, audience measurement, cultural labor, fan relations, and mobile platform development.

Hot on the list will be a discussion of how media players should be handling media convergence and consumer content creation culture.

Chris Luebkeman, the director of Arup's Global Foresight, will be giving a talk on Second Life on Future Challenges: Global Creative Contexts at 6 PM GMT. The SL site is made up of the STEEP categories of Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic and Political, and a card for each area is depicted and shaded underneath a leafy canopy.
You must be an SL member to join in on the conversation, but membership is open to all.

I am heading to the Goodness 2.0 event tonight. My friend Rob Purdie will be speaking as a project management trainer and technology consultant for social change organisations. I hope to heckle from the crowd. Is goodness reaching everyone that it needs to? Perhaps a sizing up of the audience tonight will help to clarify the answer. In my conference attending experience the audience is usually pale and male. Although women do increasingly show up at MiniCamps.

Description
How can wikis, blogs, social networks, virtual worlds and other web 2.0 tools become more than interesting technology? How might a 'read/write web' create new and innovative ways for organisations to work and to communicate? April's Beers and Innovation looks at the way in which technological progress can and does lead to better work, and ultimately, we hope, a better world.

Who should attend according to Beers and Innovation:
"This session is relevant for charities, campaigning organisations, public sector bodies, creative and digital agencies, and anyone interested in how technology intersects with society."

For those who want to keep connected to what is going on in the Web 2.0 world there is Geekdinner on Wednesday February 21st, which this month will feature Tara Hunt, author of Horse Pig Cow, and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency.

London Geekdinner comes at the tail end of the Future of Web Apps..., which is sold out....

If you could capture and store every minute of your life into bits, would you? The reality of creating a digital archive of one's life may be arriving sooner than you think. Gordon Bell is making sure of it with a MyLifeBitsProject. The growth of digital storage capacity has reached new levels, and today a $600 (US) hard drive can hold up to one trillion bytes of data, which should be enough to hold all your e-mails,web pages, papers and books, oh and you might as well throw in your iPod tunes and up to 10 pictures a day or 3650 a year for the next 60 years.

And if current trends continue, within a decade we will be able to carry all of the above on our cell phone's flash memory, while connecting wirelessly on our PCs. Fantastic, or scary, you be the judge. I can't help but think about what it actually means to carry the entire arc of our lives on a flash card. Will we all spend more of our waking time reliving the nostalgic best moments in life, and deleting the ones that don't live up to our expectations?

And while a new generation of inexpensive sensors are being created to record information about our health and physical movements, have the manufacturers actually investigated whether there is a latent consumer interest and demand for these products? While I can see the potential benefit of reading all of my body's vitals, often times (to my parents' disappointment) I don't get around to reading the daily newspaper, and wonder whether this will establish itself as the multi-vitamin in my life that I forget to take every morning. Vitabits, you might say, for the well-informed and well-connected.