Beyond the Biomedical: Ebola Response and Recovery Through a Psychosocial Lens
Humanitarian responders must look beyond the biomedical lens to ensure successful interventions across global health programmes
Humanitarian responders must look beyond the biomedical lens to ensure successful interventions across global health programmes
In the last two decades few countries have experienced a more protracted emergency than Somalia. Absence of a functioning central government and the ongoing conflict have led to a lack of access to basic social services, resulting in the country falling amongst the highest child and maternal mortality rates in the world. This learning paper by the Regional Emergency Cluster Advisor (RECA) project captures the experience of the Somalia WASH Cluster and draws lessons on how an effective knowledge management system can be developed and implemented.
The paper aims to provide an example framework of a successful knowledge management system that can be adapted by other national WASH Clusters to support a predictable, effective, timely and coherent WASH emergency preparedness and response. The paper concludes that practical knowledge management provides information, support and clarity to field level WASH practitioners, and enhances the impact and effectiveness of humanitarian response.
In a humanitarian crisis a population’s needs are great and many–for medical attention, shelter, safe water and adequate sanitation, food, and security. Disasters that occur in places that are already resource-poor and underserviced are more devastating than they might otherwise be.
The catastrophic January 12 earthquake in Haiti is currently in the spotlight, but other disasters, such as the 2008 earthquake in China, Hurricane Katrina and the northern Pakistan earthquake in 2005, and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 also remain clear in recent memory.
This plan aims to reinforce community resilience to food insecurity by strengthening the following areas: access to and availability of food; household food security and nutrition and livelihoods; community-based disaster risk reduction; access to safe water and hygiene, and health awareness.
The plan will unite and support the efforts of partners and contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 2, to end hunger and achieve food security, as well as priority actions of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Women play a crucial role in providing care and support, and also in the use and management of the water resources and sanitation at the household level. In addition, voluntary community care work is done mostly by women, rather than men, thus as caregivers women experience further pressures brought on by the spread of HIV/AIDS in rural communities. While HIV/AIDS is not a direct water related disease, it is important to recognise that people living with this disease are much more vulnerable to infections or diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera and other diseases linked to poor water supply and sanitation, thus it is essential that such diseases are prevented.
Having acknowledged this fact, it is important to note that there is still a low level of participation of women, particularly in decision-making and as a result, women still suffer the consequence of poor water and sanitary facilities,
This practical field guide brings together lessons learned from Oxfam’s past interventions in the prevention and control of cholera, and other related guidance. The aim is to provide a quick, step-by-step guide to inform cholera outbreak interventions and ensure public health programmes that are rapid, community-based, well-tailored, and gender and diversity aware.
They will enable both public health teams and programme managers to undertake necessary preparations to prevent cholera outbreaks from occurring and to respond effectively when they have occurred. They have been specifically designed to fit the cholera outbreak curve, depicting key activities in each critical phase before, during and after an outbreak. They can also be adapted to suit other water- and sanitation-related outbreaks, such as Typhoid, Hepatitis E, and dysentery, as well as other WASH-related diarrhoeal outbreaks
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…