Expert of the Week   for  27 Jul - 02 Aug 2015

Thank you Mr. Jonathan,

 I do appreciate your insight in innovative awareness. While mobile phone possession disparity exist in remote communities, experience has shown that community risk advocates can be more effective in  communicating gender-sensitive messages because they understand the communication style for a local mass audience.

 Tech tools such as mobile phones, internet, and social media are gradually gaining prominence in mass media communication. However, tech penetration cannot be an accurate measure to estimating the risk education of a local community. I usually advise that risk content and themes should be developed in consonance with the local risk belief of a community while delivering the risk message. Developing risk content for tech tools should involve the contributions of  local risk advocates to ensure that the views of a local community is conceptualized appropriately in the risk message. I also understand the possibility and place of leveraging on tech tools in risk information literacy programming which is establishing a platform that provides knowledge sharing in an online community for effective response collaboration among stakeholders and the local community.

Warm Regards.

Thank you Ms Hilary,

I do appreciate the question. Firstly, The Nigerian Government responded swiftly to the Ebola Virus out break because a collaborative mechanism existed between stakeholders in the Health, National Emergency Management Agency and  a team of consultants that employed in part the risk information literacy programming. Hence,you would have realized that the Ebola virus penetration did not succeed through the borders in Nigeria with effective Quarantine and risk information theme penetration on Ebola even at the local communities. I reemphasize that proactive and preventive measures are the best ways to reducing such disasters.

More importantly, effective risk communication strategies could have been developed in collaboration with the local communities in combating the Ebola spread in West Africa by proactively developing the local community response capacity and strengthening the  communication channels that existed using community advocates to swiftly pass the risk information especially for local communities that had no radio or television coverage. Also governments and International partners should have developed effective systems that share risk information and collaborative mechanism while developing strategies that will sustain continuous risk education in local communities.