Specific Issues in Conflict Countries: The Case of DRC, Liberia and Sierra Leone

This presentation from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) explores communication issues around oral polio vaccine (OPV) as part of the polio eradication (PE) effort in conflict countries in Africa.

For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, issues include (amongst others): persisting rumours on origin of vaccines, rumours on the harmfulness of vaccines, difficulty in controlling such rumours, insufficient social mobilisation material, hasty and inadequate training of personnel and insufficient supervision, absence of social mobilisation focal points in health zones, untrained personnel and lack of adequate support in social mobilisation, lack of methodical and frequent monitoring and evaluation, inadequate awareness of the population about acute flaccid paralysis (AFP), lack of motivation on the part of health personnel and clinicians regarding AFP surveillance, absence of education programmes on AFPs, existence of zones of insecurity in health zones (causing, for instance, serious risks of deadly attacks by military factions on social mobilisers and on vaccinators responsible for house-to-house visits), poor involvement of local authorities, lack of support for AFP social mobilisation activities, and lack of information, education, and communication (IEC) at health centres.

The presentation next explores lessons learned from synchronised National Immunization Days (NIDs) in Sierra Leone (October-November 2000), which took place in the context of a political rift between Sierra Leone and Liberia. As indicated here, "the geographical/physical barriers posed a lot of accessibility constraints for the effective communication and social mobilisation to reach grassroots target groups within chiefdoms and boarder villages". For example, children in the rebel-held areas could not get immunisation, as social workers and communicators did not get access, or they were not allowed to enter in all those areas. Furthermore, "[t]here is a huge language barrier among the peoples of Mano River countries and this poses a serious hindrance for message dissemination and co-ordination/linkage." That said, "[t]here were exchanges of policy level officers and government ministers, which resulted in high level advocacy and cordiality among the countries to solve the issues of insecurity and political animosity."

As detailed here, effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of the communication plan has been a challenge for several reasons, and synchronised NIDs were (at the time of this writing) elusive in the Mano River Basin for the obvious reason of war. Finally, the presentation notes the "need to move communication planners and social mobilizer from the traditional approach of 'throwing' information at local people to a people based participatory approach focussing on overcoming behavioral barriers to promoting desired behavior..."

For more information, contact:

Paryss Kouta

UNICEF WCARO

P.O. Box 29720

Yoff, Dakar

Senegal

Tel: 221 33 869 58 58

pkouta@unicef.org