This paper seeks to understand the fear many Guineans feel towards Ebola response initiatives and why the educators, doctors and burial teams have sometimes encountered resistance, occasionally violent.
Practitioners of traditional medicine – the first port of call for 80% of Guineans – could be invaluable in helping fight other killer diseases, such as malaria.
Shunned by their communities and unable to work, female survivors of Ebola in Guinea face profound hardship as they try to care for their families.
Marie Claire Therese Fwelo Mwanza, a social mobilization expert with 27 years experience at WHO, helped end 5 of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) 7 Ebola outbreaks through effective community engagement.
In 2014, Marie Claire played a role in bringing DRC’s latest Ebola outbreak to an end in 3 months. Then, she, and 60 colleagues she trained, went to Guinea to support the outbreak response there.
International partners are supporting Gueckedou health authorities to implement response actions. Médecins Sans Frontières has established a treatment centre and ensures the transport of suspected cases.
After many months of prolonged closure due to fear of Ebola transmission, schools have reopened in Guinea last month.
WHO and partners have played a crucial role in preparing schools to open their doors to students.
Through household visits, a presence on prefecture streets and conversations with influential members of key community groups, surveillance teams are spreading the message about Ebola and providing support to families
This paper by Anoko J. N., reports on the success of a communication programme among 26 rebellious villages in Forest Guinea during fieldwork in June-July 2014.
The Ebola response in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea demonstrated that community engagement is critical in responding to epidemics. This was not always a guiding principle in the fight against Ebola, which initially prioritized biomedical and militarized responses. Working in partnership with communities – providing space to listen and acknowledge distinct needs – only came later in the response. Incorporating communities in different aspects of the response was partly hampered by the inflexibility of some agencies, which wanted to promote a perfect model for community engagement.
Arguably, these tended to overlook the diversity within communities, and did not respond to the realities of Ebola’s spread.During an inter-agency social mobilization workshop organized by Oxfam in September 2015, a group of practitioners and technical experts agreed that it would be best to explore diverse models of community empowerment and action that adhered to specific key principles rather than promote a fixed ‘one size fits…
Resistance to the Ebola response has been more widespread and more severe in Guinea, than in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with sometimes violent incidents.
This is due to a complex interaction of many factors, including underlying causes and the nature of the response.
The economic effects of the Ebola health crisis are slowly unfolding as the virus continues to affect Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. The most important sector is mining as these three countries share a rich iron ore geological beltway. The macroeconomic impacts of the crisis came into sharp focus when London Mining, Sierra Leone’s second largest iron ore producer, suspended its activities.
Ebola is also having a devastating impact on the informal mining sector, which provides a livelihood to some of the country’s poorest people. However, how the effects of mining have left countries vulnerable to the Ebola crisis also deserves attention. Large-scale mining creates social and ecological disruptions that could encourage the emergence and spread of disease. External mining interventions have also fuelled suspicion by local populations of foreign and government interventions, as they have received so few benefits from the mining resource boom.
The international response to Ebola has been decried for being ‘too slow, too little, too late’. As well as racing to respond, we need to consider what has happened over the past decades to leave exposed fault lines that enabled Ebola to move so rapidly across boundaries of people’s bodies, villages, towns and countries. Gender is important to these fault lines in two related spheres. Women and men are differentially affected by Ebola, with women in the region taking on particular roles and responsibilities as they care for the ill and bury the dead, and as they navigate ever-diminishing livelihood options and increasingly limited health resources available to pregnant women.
Furthermore, structural preconditions in ‘development’ itself have deepened these gendered fault lines. A currently powerful set of ideas in gender and development discourse locates certain patterns of ‘non-modern’ gender relationships as the root cause of poverty and underdevelopment.