Ebola Virus Disease

While Ebola was hitting Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea hard, the Togolese Ministry of Health wanted to have an awareness-raising strategy and tools ready to use should the epidemic reach the country.

We carried out an anthropological survey of knowledge and perceptions of Ebola, and of how people perceived the communication messages that had been circulating for several months.

The survey showed that the messages had reached the population extremely well, but that the ones people remembered most were the erroneous messages about a risk of catching the disease from animals during the current epidemic. The actual routes of human-to-human transmission were poorly understood. Moreover, the population as a whole had stopped following the prevention measures after applying them for a limited period.

I proposed a communication strategy that dropped the messages about animal risk and instead explained the risks of human-to-human transmission and the prevention measures. I proposed separate communication plans for three epidemiological situations: the disease absent from the country; unaffected regions once the disease has reached the country; and affected regions.