Readings & Audiovisual

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how syndemics and protracted crises increase the vulnerability of communities facing concurrent, cascading risks and complex secondary events that aggravate health risks and underlying burdens of infectious and non-communicable diseases. Epidemics start and end in communities, where citizens are often the first to observe changes in the environment and in animal health, and the first to be exposed to new or re-emerging pathogens. Local stakeholders have crucial roles in the prevention and control of disease transmission, and frequently develop systems of appropriate health and social care based on local knowledge. However, current approaches to disaster risk management often do not sufficiently recognise and engage community expertise.

This document provides WHO checklists for risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) readiness and initial response for novel coronaviruses (nCoV) recently identified in Wuhan, China (2019-nCoV). The objective of this document is to provide actionable guidance for countries to implement effective RCCE strategies which will help protect the public’s health in the early response to nCoV. This document includes recommended RCCE goals and actions for countries preparing for nCoV cases and for countries that have confirmed -nCoV cases.

Community engagement is commonly regarded as a crucial entry point for gaining access and securing trust during humanitarian emergencies. In this article, we present three case studies of community engagement encounters during the West African Ebola outbreak. They represent strategies commonly implemented by the humanitarian response to the epidemic: communication through comités de veille villageois in Guinea, engagement with NGO-affiliated community leadership structures in Liberia and indirect mediation to chiefs in Sierra Leone. These case studies are based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out before, during and after the outbreak by five anthropologists involved in the response to Ebola in diverse capacities. Our goal is to represent and conceptualise the Ebola response as a dynamic interaction between a response apparatus, local populations and intermediaries, with uncertain outcomes that were negotiated over time and in response to changing conditions. Our findings show that community engagement tactics that are based on fixed notions of legitimacy are unable to respond to the fluidity of community response environments during emergencies. [Ebola; community engagement; ethnography; legitimacy]