Ebola diaries: Regaining the people’s trust

WHO                                                                                                          March 31, 2015
Cristiana Salvi, a risk communications specialist from WHO’s European regional office was deployed to Guinea at the end of April – early May 2014 to provide social mobilization support to the Ebola response. Social mobilization involves working with communities to gain their acceptance of the need for early identification of people with illness, early treatment and identification and follow up of all people who have been in contact with people confirmed to have Ebola virus disease.

 Cristiana was among the first from WHO offices other than Headquarters and the African office to provide support to the field response, many others followed from the “wider WHO”. She travelled to Gueckedou where communities had begun to hide people who were sick, fearing treatment centres, believing rumours Ebola response teams were there for sinister purposes. This is what she found.

Excerpt:

..The main thing we needed to do was change the messages - the ones being used were too general. Most of them had been taken from outbreaks in other countries, like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and those materials did not take into account specific circumstances. What we did at that point was to identify the behavioural barriers and right target audience and the perceptions driving those barriers. I was in DRC in 2007 and the reasons driving resistance were mainly religious but in Gueckedou it was especially mistrust of foreign people...."                                                                                           Photo by WHO/ Kamal Ait-Ikhlefit

Read complete diary.
http://www.who.int/features/2015/ebola-diaries-salvi/en/