Ebola in DRC: NGOs organize to coordinate community engagement work

NAIROBI — NGOs responding to the Ebola emergency in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have formed a consortium to improve information sharing and coordinate their work on community engagement. "The idea with this consortium is that we share all of our data, analysis, and strategies to be more efficient and to reach more communities," said Pauline Schibli, Ebola programs director at Mercy Corps, which is leading the consortium. Its activities are due to start this month. Community engagement has been one of the toughest challenges of the response to the current Ebola outbreak, including attacks on health workers and treatment centers, and patients refusing the vaccine. For months, health organizations have been grappling with how to better understand and account for the complexity of community responses to their interventions, with workers gathering feedback from communities about what questions they have and whether responders are appropriately adapting to cultural norms. There has also been frustration over the lack of integration of NGOs — many of which have long-standing relationships with communities in the region — in coordination of the national response led by the DRC government and World Health Organization. Responders say that NGOs were initially excluded from most of the coordination meetings, though their role has recently been strengthened. The fourth national strategic response plan, which covers July to December, includes NGO invitations to strategic meetings with the government, U.N. agencies, and WHO, where they can share feedback and access information. Despite this progress, the expertise of NGOs is still not effectively integrated into plans at the national level, Schibli said. In the meantime, the new program — LEVER, which stands for “Fight Ebola through Revitalized Communities” in French — is hoping to improve information sharing and programmatic coordination between NGOs, to increase their impact on the ground. It includes Mercy Corps, Oxfam International, and CARE International, which will harmonize community engagement activities; International Alert, which will focus on conflict analysis and mapping; and CORACON, a collective of media organizations, which will produce interactive radio programs. LEVER has funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance and aims to reach about 655,000 people directly, as well as more than 3.6 million people indirectly. The idea behind LEVER is that the NGOs will intervene in areas where they have a previous humanitarian or Ebola response presence. For example, Mercy Corps has been working with groups of women in Goma on health issues for the past five years, and is now adding Ebola work to these efforts, Schibli said. Consortium members will have regular meetings where they share challenges and work to adapt their response. The consortium will also work with social enterprises Dimagi and Viamo, which will provide tech solutions, such as call centers to answer questions and respond to rumors. The centers will use interactive voice response technology, which allows computers to have a conversation with community members who call in. It aims to take a holistic approach to tackling Ebola, including community engagement activities on health preparedness and improving access to WASH services and health centers by rehabilitating roads, bridges, and other key infrastructure in Ebola-sensitive areas. The program is funded for 12 months because the NGOs “must continue working post-Ebola,” Schibli said. Other efforts to enhance community engagement include the International Federation of the Red Cross and the DRC Red Cross, which are collecting feedback from communities on issues such as rumors, suspicions, and concerns, and have collected about 440,000 data points so far. This feedback data has been used in areas such as to help better design Ebola treatment centers to ensure that community members are more likely to seek care, according to Cheick Camara, community engagement and accountability coordinator at IFRC DRC.