COVID-19 Global Risk Communication and Community Engagement Strategy

"Uptake of protective behaviours and adherence to social measures will continue to be critical even with safe and effective vaccines and treatments. Strengthened RCCE support will be critical to maximize understanding, acceptance and uptake."

Due to the fact that initial risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) priorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic focused on raising knowledge and awareness, these messages frequently took the form of directives and one-way communication. However, more robust community participation has played a role in disease control and elimination in many countries and will continue to be critical in combatting COVID-19. Building on and replacing the first COVID-19 global RCCE strategy, released in March 2020, this revised version focuses on supporting regional and national responses to identify the most appropriate and effective community engagement approaches for their particular contexts. Reflecting the experiences and views of a range of partners working on RCCE, it is underpinned by a socio-behavioural trends analysis and builds on the learnings from the response to date. The overarching goal of the strategy: that people-centred and community-led approaches are championed widely - resulting in increased trust and social cohesion, and ultimately a reduction in the negative impacts of COVID-19.

This strategy was developed between June to October 2020 and included a series of consultations with global and regional stakeholders. The process and publication was led by the RCCE Collective Service [PDF], a collaborative partnership between RCCE practitioners convened by International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), with support from the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), and stakeholders from the public health and humanitarian sectors. The RCCE strategy directly supports the United Nations Comprehensive Response to COVID-19 [PDF], which includes WHO's Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan.

The document is organised around 4 strategic objectives for RCCE; illustrative activities are included under each objective, with guidance for country, regional, and global actors. They include:

• Be community led: Facilitate community-led responses through the improvement of the quality and consistency of RCCE approaches.
• Be data driven: Generate, analyse, and use disaggregated data about each community's context, capacities, perceptions, and behaviours.
• Reinforce capacity and local solutions: Control the pandemic and mitigate its impacts through mentoring, technical support, and resource sharing with local actors (including media and communication sectors) and national or subnational government.
• Be collaborative: Strengthen coordination at global, regional, and subnational, and national levels to increase quality, harmonisation, optimisation, and integration of RCCE across the different technical areas of the public health, humanitarian, and development responses to COVID-19.

These objectives are to be informed by core guiding principles that underpin all effective RCCE, regardless of the context:

• Nationally led - but is supported by local, national, and international civil society and the communities themselves.
• Community centred - starts with understanding the knowledge, capacities, concerns, structures, and vulnerabilities of different groups in communities, including attention to community needs other than the risk of COVID-19.
• Participatory - involves supporting communities, especially vulnerable people, to lead in the analysis, planning, design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of RCCE activities
• Build on trust - is grounded in an understanding of reasons for mistrust, which are varied and related to structural, historical, and cultural factors.
• Open and transparent, even in uncertainty - entails timely, audience-tailored, science-based communication, adapted to the local context, language, and culture.
• Informed by data - reflects a balance between data about individuals and data about social and structural factors that drive behaviours (e.g., social norms).
• Integrated - is harmonised within the public health, humanitarian, and development responses to COVID-19 and mainstreamed across all sectors.
• Coordinated - synchronises efforts across technical specialties, as COVID-19 impacts many aspects of the community beyond health.
• Inclusive - prioritises representation of all groups in local decision-making and ensuring RCCE approaches are accessible, culturally appropriate, and gender sensitive.
• Accountable - ensures communities can access information about and participate in decision-making about the response and documenting and responding to community feedback on the response.

The strategy document discusses approaches for engaging the most vulnerable (with a table listing vulnerable groups and reflecting both medical and socio-economic vulnerability) and then looks at the challenges ahead, including: uncertainty, pandemic fatigue, trust, community engagement, coordination, stigma and discrimination, misinformation, and economic pressure. For example, strong RCCE will be needed to accompany the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. This will involve not only anticipating rumours and misinformation but also adjusting to the many factors still unknown when it comes to vaccination priorities, strategies, and effects, in different contexts. There is also the potential for anti-vaccination movements to tie any COVID-19 vaccine development to other vaccinations, potentially increasing hesitancy around existing routine immunisation.

Next, the global behaviour change framework with key indicators for RCCE is outlined. The framework is organised around 6 dimensions: (i) information and communication; (ii) knowledge and understanding; (iii) perceptions; (iv) practices; (v) social environment; and (vi) structural factors. Its main objective is to establish and maintain a set of global, regional, and national indicators that support: strategic thinking, operational tracking, real-time evidence-based decision making, and advocacy and transparency around RCCE efforts to influence behaviour and increase community empowerment and social cohesion. These indicators, corresponding to the 6 dimensions, can be found in a chart spanning pages 24-30 of the document.

Annexes include:

1. Methodology
2. Supporting RCCE guidance documents
3. RCCE in practice
4. Summary of global evidence of socio-behavioural trends for COVID-19
5. The RCCE Collective Service

Given the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic, this RCCE strategy covers a 6-month period from December 2020. The next revision is scheduled for May 2021.