The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that health is not just a prerequisite to development but is fundamental to economies, societies, national security, and political stability.  The emphasis on ‘building back better’ allows governments across the globe to re-think their strategies for emergency preparedness and response to avoid and largely minimize the devasting impact witnessed during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Risk Communication and Community Engagement Pillar in Namibia aims to build on its experience during the COVID-19 pandemic and build capacity on the core competencies of RCCE and content creation for risk communication during any public health event. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Namibia established a Risk Communication and Community Engagement Pillar under the incident management system and printed more than a 1 million communication materials with translations in local languages and braille.  In addition, more than 3,000 community health care workers and volunteers were trained, and over 80% of the Namibia population reached through mass media communication.

WHO and CDC supported the Ministry of Health and Social Services train 33 Regional RCCE Coordinators and Regional RCCE Pillar leads to strengthen risk communication systems at regional and district levels.  The two weeks trainings aimed to

• To increase knowledge and skills on emergency risk communication to be able to provide timely, accurate and context specific information pre, during and post a public health emergency
• To increase knowledge and skills in RCCE evidence-based planning and implementation
• To increase knowledge and skills in generation of data on behavioral and social drivers influencing public’s perception of the risk/public health threat, and the possible actions to address it
• To increase knowledge and skills on community engagement, social mobilization, and health education
• Increase understanding on the importance of relevant, timely and context specific content
• Increase knowledge and skills on developing content for different communication channels and audiences including for community engagement and social mobilization
• Map potential disease outbreaks nationally, regionally, and globally that may affect the country and identify existing messages for each of the disease outbreaks, adapt and/or develop additional context-based messages for each identified disease

The Regional teams revised their action plans to strengthen regional and district RCCE interventions on risk communication system, internal & partner communication & coordination, public communication, communication engagement with affected communities and dynamic listening and rumor management.

WHO will continue to provide support towards RCCE for increased pandemic preparedness as part of the Strengthening and Utilizing Response Groups for Emergencies (SURGE) flagship programme to ensure health security in the WHO Africa Region.