Two different organisations, working half the world away from each other, were confronted with a similar problem. As Covid-19 began its spread, critical information about the virus – what it is, how it is spread, how that spread might be slowed – was not reaching the people they support.

In marginalised communities across Kenya, the government was displaying posters with information that seemed to be copied and pasted from other countries. The details were contextually irrelevant and the information hard to decipher. For indigenous communities living in remote areas of Peru, information was barely reaching them at all.

The two organisations – the Green String Network (GSN) in Kenya and the Indigenous People’s Organisation of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO) in Peru – hit on a similar solution: image-based communication that rooted key information about the pandemic in contextually appropriate messages.

“The ordinary Kenyan citizen wants their family to be healthy and safe,” said Angi Yoder-Maina, GSN’s executive director. “She has the required agency to do that if she has enough information to make good choices.” Both ORPIO and GSN scrambled as the virus hit their communities to make sure the people living there had that information.

Those efforts are essential. A team of Harvard University public health researchers, in trying to understand why members of racial and ethnic minorities and underserved population groups suffer disproportionately from the consequences of disasters and emergencies, cited the lack of resources that “can help people to take action during an emergency.” This gap is exacerbated by language barriers and a reliance on informal sources of information, among other barriers.

Those exact challenges were beginning to emerge in the communities in Kenya and Peru where GSN and ORPIO work. Neither organisation is explicitly focused on mounting responses to public health crises, but they both do work that is rooted in communicating vital information to marginalised and overlooked communities. And that prepared them to start immediately filling the information gap that emerged at the start of the pandemic.

From Nairobi, GSN takes a peace-building approach to resolving regional injustices, working with communities to identify trauma and to heal. Those conversations can be fraught and the team has become expert at using illustrations to encourage discussion and communicate complex concepts.

They were quick to recognise the shortcomings of the early efforts to raise Covid-19 awareness in Kenya. “We realised that all of the social messaging was western readapted to Kenya, though sometimes they would put in a black figurine,” Yoder-Maina said. So her team drafted some alternative designs and took them to the ministry of health to see if they might be useful. Officials there asked Yoder-Maina to affix the ministry’s logo and distribute the posters as widely as possible.

GSN put digital versions in a variety of local languages online to download and, as funds have been available, have taken printed version to networks where the posters might be particularly useful, like to owners of the minibuses that people rely on for transportation.

In indigenous communities in Peru, there was initially a reluctance to recognise how serious the Coronavirus pandemic was. But as the first images of people dying from the virus in the country began to circulate, people started to take the threat more seriously, said Tom Bewick, the Peru country director for the Rainforest Foundation U.S., which works closely with ORPIO. And that’s when they began to realise there was a shortage of information.

As the virus started entering communities, “there was a uniform respect and fear and concern and craving for information,” he said, which prompted ORPIO to draft an initial set of culturally relevant infographics to distribute to its 430 member communities.

Having worked with and in these areas for years, they knew social distancing in an indigenous community, where people live in tight quarters, needed to look different than in other parts of the country, so they crafted strategies that took that into account. They also anticipated the low literacy levels in some areas, which is why they rely on graphics as much as possible to convey key messages.

The Rainforest Foundation has been helping to translate those graphics for additional communities and also to roll out updated versions as new information and recommendations become available.

“Those of us who can get any information we want take this for granted,” Bewick said, but even getting these infographics to communities that are so isolated was a challenge. The Rainforest Foundation was able to send them via tablets and smartphones that they had given to community leaders to report environmental crime and deforestation.

The graphics and posters have their limitations, though, particularly with the situation evolving rapidly and guidance and recommendations changing frequently. With their partner organisations, Bewick said they are looking to experiment with a weekly podcast-like initiative to get more detailed information to the communities.

Initiatives like this emerge – and succeed—Yoder-Maina said, because they are created in conversation with the communities they are supposed to benefit. These organisations have done the work before the pandemic struck to build people’s trust and understand their specific needs. “That’s why we knew there was a missing element to contextualise,” she said. “That’s why we were able to say what has to change.” – Andrew Green

(Picture credit: UnSplash)

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