Young People Played a Game-Changing Role in the Battle Against Ebola in Liberia
An Ebola survivor reports on a pioneering community initiative in Monrovia that could save lives in the fight against other infectious diseases.
Liberia
The Opposite of Denial: Social Learning at the Onset of the Ebola Emergency in Liberia
This working paper reports on a study to identify the pace of Ebola-related social learning in urban and peri-urban areas around Monrovia, Liberia during August 2014, at the onset of the emergency phase of the epidemic. The research demonstrates how under conditions of accelerating health crises, social learning is rapid even in a context of heightened instability, suspicion, and misinformation.
Misleading information in the form of local rumours and unhelpful government and international healthcare messages complicate this process and can produce anxiety. However, contrary to widespread assumptions of ‘ignorance’, and amidst the circulation of conspiracy theories, communities were able to uptake essential information regarding Ebola transmission and management rapidly and efficiently.
Community-Centered Responses to Ebola in Urban Liberia: The View from Below
This working paper reports on a study to identify epidemic control priorities among 15 communities in Monrovia and Montserrado County, Liberia. Data were collected in September 2014 on the following topics: prevention, surveillance, care-giving, community-based treatment and support, networking/hotlines/calling response teams and referrals, management of corpses, quarantine and isolation, orphans, memorialization, and the need for community-based training and education.
The study also reviewed issues of fear and stigma towards Ebola victims and survivors, and support for those who have been affected by Ebola. The findings provide several models that can inform international and governmental support for community-based management of the current Ebola outbreak.
Community Perceptions of Ebola Response Efforts in Liberia: Montserrado and Nimba Counties
This study aimed to support Oxfam’s Public Health Promotion (PHP) strategy through a rapid qualitative assessment of the remaining social barriers to compliance with Ebola prevention and treatment messages. At the time of the study, most Liberians had a high awareness of Ebola prevention and treatment information.
However, new infections continued to occur in “hot spots” around the country. A preliminary assessment suggested that negative perceptions and fear of Ebola response efforts contributed to non-compliance and resistance in some areas. Research activities assessed the sources of negative perceptions and fears of Ebola response activities, and looked for suggestions to improve Oxfam’s response.
Guide to Community Engagement in WASH: A Practitioner’s Guide, Based on Lessons from Ebola
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…
Return of the Rebel: Legacies of War and Reconstruction in West Africa’s Ebola Epidemic
The spread of Ebola in West Africa centres on a region with a shared recent history of transnational civil war and internationally led post-conflict reconstruction efforts. This legacy of conflict and shortcomings in the reconstruction efforts are key to understanding how the virus has spread. The dynamics of warfare tied into and accentuated the state’s remoteness from many people. Ebola has simply unmasked persisting deep public suspicion and mistrust of the state, laying bare the limits of post-conflict reconstruction to transform state-society relations.
The reconstruction emphasis on rehabilitating pre-existing governance structures – such as the paramount chieftancy in Sierra Leone – did not redress deeply rooted social inequalities, with the result that many people have been marginalised. Ebola’s impacts threaten to undo some of the advances made since the wars ended in Sierra Leone and Liberia, yet there are critical lessons to learn about how to better support societies shaped by violence and war.
Ebola and Extractive Industry
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 Pathology of Inequality: Gender and Ebola in West Africa
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.
