Opinion: Tackling the COVID-19 Infodemic In Africa, By Adebayo Fayoyin
Pandemics require centralised and coherent messaging for harmonised understanding and action. The absence of a coordinated response at the programmatic level has resulted in the lack of a common communication agenda. There is a strong possibility that Africa could be seriously affected by the virus, even at that we are yet to see any common continental social mobilisation agenda. From the various interviews in many African countries, our communication agenda for the pandemic is lacklustre.
The public health education response at the onset of the pandemic was hardly in local languages. In Nigeria, over the years health promotion has been relegated to the background in public health and education efforts across the country. Often times health promotion efforts are introduced as an afterthought.There is a high level of overdependence of messaging in official languages to the detriment of conceptualising and implementing message development in local languages.
Believing a false narrative e.g., Africans don’t catch the virus or that the virus is for travellers, the rich, the ‘been to.’The public not being fully supportive of containment strategies;Organising misinformation campaigns on government welfare action, as illustrated in Nigeria.The information crisis underscores the role of fact-checking in information dissemination.
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