What have we learned from our response to COVID-19?

What has our response to COVID-19 taught us?

... As a civil society organisation that does not work on service delivery, we at Breakthrough debated our community response to COVID-19 endlessly. The voices pouring out of black boxes on my Zoom screen were frustrated and angry. My colleagues said, "We are fighting several pandemics at various levels, as technology and social media has made misinformation fly at a rapid rate. This has made it difficult for us to get back the rapport we generally enjoy with the communities with whom we work. We are now being viewed with suspicion because we are talking about vaccines and treatments."

Consequently, we decided that as we start building back, one of the areas of focus will be our communication on the pandemic, and how that communication can be context-specific and reflect the voices of the people we work with. This was based on an important lesson we learned during the last 18 months - in a crisis, if we forget to have consistent dialogue with the communities for whom we are designing services, and if we do not use targeted communication to talk about what's relevant to them, they may partake in misinformation and fake news ...

... continued - For the full blog please access this link

Ed - In support of everyone's work. please provide your answer(s) to the question posed by this blog "What has our response to COVID-19 taught us?"

To contribute to this dialogue and sharing either reply by email to this communicaiton; comment at this link or click the "Please click to review ...: link above or below.

Many thanks for participating in what is an important discussion.

Sohini Bhattacharya
President & CEO - Breakthrough
India

Specific thanks to IDR for permission to republish this blog - the original is at this link