Coronavirus: African organizations collaborate to spread awareness

Africa Centres for Disease Control (CDC) has declared its readiness to collaborate with Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), the leading technology innovation centre in Africa, in a venture to educate and sensitize the continent to COVID-19.

The collaboration is aimed at launching a call for innovative communication projects on COVID-19 based on indigenous African languages targeted at the semi-urban and rural population across Africa.

The collaboration will focus on projects delivering vetted critical information from Africa CDC to Africans in remote areas using innovative and culturally sensitive messaging.

The communication projects are also expected to help counter disbelief and misinformation, catalyse citizens actions and solidarity as well as combat stigmatization.

This involves educating the public and ensuring fact-based information reaches even remote locations through such approaches like comics, animation, illustrations, infographics, interactive SMS and mobile apps.

The selected teams will be supported with grant funding of up to $5000 for research and design support. Proposed projects can be focused on one African country or multiple countries across the continent.

Dr. Benjamin Djoudalbaye, Head of Policy, Health Diplomacy, and Communication at the Africa CDC stated that “The collaboration would enhance efforts of the Africa CDC towards educating the public and ensuring that the right information reaches even remote locations across the continent to avoid unnecessary panic and misinformation.”

With a track record of collaborating with key players to explore the application of technology to solve Africa’s systemic problems in Public Health, Education, Governance in the continent, CcHUB through its internal research and development unit, CcHUB Design Lab, based in Kigali, Rwanda, will collaborate with innovators to provide technical support using innovative digital and non-digital methodologies. This will ensure the mass messaging on Coronavirus reaches the semi-urban and rural population across Africa.

“This is a critical time where tech in Africa should be used in smart ways to ensure broader citizen awareness and understanding of COVID-19 response strategies and precautions,” Bosun Tijani, CcHUB’s Co-founder and CEO, noted.

This collaboration is supported by the Joint African Union – German Cooperation on Citizens Engagement and Innovative Data Use for Africa’s Development programme implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).