African Voices: Meet Nomfundo Moroe

Raising awareness about the dangers of workplace noise, a researcher-practitioner strives to find evidence-based solutions that will benefit people in the real world. She is also training the next generation of audiologists

By Alloya Elwadie January 12, 2022

African Academics

This Q&A series highlights the experiences and achievements of select African researchers who have benefited from training and fellowship programs supported through Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Higher Education and Research in Africa portfolio.

Nomfundo Moroe, PhD, is senior lecturer in the Speech Pathology and Audiology department and current head of discipline (audiology) at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

What do you research, and what drew you to the topic?

I am interested in focusing on occupational noise–induced hearing loss in the mining sector. Before I joined academia, I worked in a hospital. I had patients coming in with hearing loss, and most of them came from the mines. We tried to restore their hearing as much as possible, but we can never fully achieve this. Even with hearing aids, hearing does not return to normal. But what hit me the hardest was the fact that most of those guys lost their jobs because of acquiring a hearing loss in the workplace — they had become a health and safety hazard. When they work, they need to hear signals to communicate. Without intact hearing, safety is compromised.

And what came next? How did you go from that observation into PhD research on occupational hearing loss?

So I have three brothers who are also working in the mining sector. Luckily, they are not exposed to noise because they are in management positions. But after my experiences in the hospital, I had discussions with them to try and get a picture of what it is like working at a mine, what noise levels people are exposed to, and what happens to a miner with hearing loss.

To my dismay, I realized that while most miners were paid compensation, the amount is not nearly sufficient to last a lifetime. Why is that? Because with noise — especially occupational noise, where you are exposed to excessive noise for eight hours a day — after 10 to 15 years you are most likely going to lose your hearing. And once you lose your hearing, it cannot be restored. You can resort to using a hearing aid, but you won’t get your job back. And your compensation is not going to last your lifetime.

So if a 20-year-old starts working at a mine, it’s only a matter of time until we have a 35-year-old who is dependent on the state for their upkeep. And that individual still has to survive through 30 years to reach their pension. So this means if they’re going to live for 70 years, 35 of those years they’ll be sustained by taxpayers’ money — all because they lost their hearing at an early age while trying to make a living. So that prompted me to look into noise and its impact on the mine workers. And around the same time in 2014, at a health summit, the chairperson of the Mine Health and Safety Council indicated that the mining industry was concerned about the number of workers developing hearing loss, and pledged their support for interventions to reduce excessive noise in the mining sector. So I guess my study was a response to the call by the Mine Health and Safety chairperson.

So what is your role as a researcher-practitioner now?

Now, being an audiologist, one of my responsibilities is to raise awareness about the impacts of excessive noise. The challenge, especially when looking at the mining sector, is that it takes a long time for one to actually lose their hearing. When I tell at-risk people about the dangers of noise before they lose their hearing, it is an abstract concept to them. “I can hear you and I’ve worked here for the past five years,” they’ll say. “Nothing is wrong with my hearing!” As far as safety is concerned, if a rock falls now, people get hurt now — the damage is immediate. But because hearing loss develops over a long period of time, people don’t take it seriously, and we have the situation where someone can be forced to live on state support for decades.

How do you, as an occupational audiologist, work with others in higher education, research, and society?

Audiology is a multidisciplinary profession, a scientific degree embedded within the social sciences. Particularly, in my institution, it falls under the humanities. I work hand-in-hand with social workers, speech therapists, and psychologists. At other universities they are more under medical science, where they then work with occupational therapists, physiotherapists, dentists, and more. So research allows me the flexibility to engage scientifically with current issues in the field, work closely with professionals in other fields, and, most importantly, add the human aspect to the scientific work that I do. My work is society-driven in that I’m looking at solutions that will benefit not just the people exposed to excessive noise in the workplace, but also their families and the society at large. I guess, being housed in the humanities always reminds me of my responsibility as a researcher, finding solutions that can benefit people in the real world. Additionally, being in higher education allows me the opportunity to train future audiologists and hopefully future researchers who will strive to find evidence-based solutions that contribute meaningfully to the field of audiology and to societal well-being.

What has helped you along your academic path?

For my academic career, what was extremely helpful was being awarded a PhD fellowship from CARTA (Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny), which allowed me to buy time from my teaching responsibilities so I could focus on my PhD. Research funding has also been critical for my career. At the same time, I was fortunate to get appointed as a permanent lecturer through nGap, the New Generation of Academics Programme, which is a prestigious equity-driven government initiative that involves recruiting highly capable scholars as new academics.

While doing my PhD, my responsibilities included training students in the classroom and exposing them to hands-on clinical training, and publishing, which means taking time out to write proposals, collect data, and then write papers. At the same time, I supervise research students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, and set exams for our undergraduate students — and we can’t forget administrative responsibilities. So you can see that my plate is always full. I have colleagues who didn’t have the same opportunities as me, who still had to carry out some of the responsibilities I was exempted from due to the CARTA and nGAP programs that provided the time, finances, and space to outsource many of the traditional burdens of teaching and publishing, allowing me instead to focus on completing my PhD — which I did in just three and a half years. I worked hard to receive these fellowships, and they are highly competitive.

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced?

For me, I’ve had fewer challenges because of the support I received. But the biggest challenge was simply trying to balance everything. When I finished my PhD, I was given much responsibility. I became the head of the department, for starters. As a new graduate, I wanted to do more research, be in the field, and get published. So, to keep research active, I enrolled in a postdoc program that allowed me to stay at my institution, fulfill my responsibilities as a lecturer and head of the department, and still engage in research. I must say it did not work out as well as I would have hoped, because I couldn’t split myself equally and make sure that none of those areas suffered.

For me, publishing is my passion. It is what drives me. Looking back, I see that I haven’t published as much as I would have liked. I haven’t done as much fieldwork, engaged with policymakers, or engaged with the mines and mineworkers. I haven’t done that because I had to make sure that the department is running and students are trained.

What did you want to do as a child, and how does that compare to your work today?

In high school, I did home economics and I wanted to be a food technician — work in a lab and look at nutrition and how everything comes together. Funnily enough, I actually applied for a degree in food nutrition, but the year that I applied, they were phasing out that degree and so they rejected my application.

I had also applied for audiology, not because I loved it or knew what it was. It so happened that there was a doctor who had a practice just across from my house. Once in a while I’d visit and we’d sit and talk. He asked if I’d heard of audiology and said it might be good for me because he was seeing patients with communication problems and he didn’t know how to help them. So I applied to Wits University, not even knowing what the degree was about! I can tell you now that what I thought it was when I applied and what it really was when I started working as an audiologist are two different things.

But I love what I’m doing much more than I ever thought I would, and being in the academy, there is no better position where you can be a scientist and a clinician at the same time. I always say that I just stumbled into this profession, but I can tell you this much: I love what I’m doing right now, and I will never give it up for anything. It’s amazing.

TOP: Nomfundo Moroe (Credit: Aya Sinada)