The Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, supported by UNICEF, is helping to prepare public health and emergency response leaders in Uzbekistan on the best ways to share lifesaving information in the event of a future natural or manmade disaster.
The Central Asian nation of 35 million, where many live in isolated outposts outside the capital city, is prone to both flooding and drought, earthquakes and, of course, disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic that struck in 2020.
UNICEF has hired CCP to create a Risk Communication and Community Engagement curriculum and train trainers on how to best to engage community members on preparation before, during and after a disaster.
“They want to set up a system that is not necessarily top down but involves community members in decision-making when it comes to emergency preparedness and disaster management,” says CCP’s Suruchi Sood, who is leading the work and has previously worked in Uzbekistan.
“That’s where our expertise comes in. It’s one thing to say, engage the community or make sure that the community participates in emergency preparedness. But it’s quite another to actually make that happen and figure out how they’re going to go do that.”
Sood says a lot of time will be spent on improving interpersonal communication skills among health providers and emergency responders. In a top-down government like Uzbekistan, engagement needs to be encouraged because many are mistrustful of how things have been done in the past.
UNICEF has published the “Minimum Quality Standards and Indicators for Community Engagement” with the principles of human rights‑ and community‑based approaches, such as participation, inclusion and accountability.
“Community engagement is a critical component of international development practice and humanitarian assistance,” the standards say. “Around the world and across contexts, community engagement approaches support communities in taking their own action in addressing their most pressing issues. … Communities should be listened to, and have a meaningful role in processes and issues that affect them.”
The challenge for Sood and the CCP team is to take these standards and translate them into what is best in the Uzbek context. This fall, Sood will lead three, four-day workshops to train more than 70 trainers from around the country to bring back concrete guidance for frontline health workers on how to best ready their communities to spread important messages during future emergencies.
“We come up with these global standards, or ways to do things, and then you go into a country and you’re trying to figure out, well, how does that standard work here in this country,” Sood says. “The standards have all these big words like inclusion, participation and decentralization.
“But how do you operationalize that in Uzbekistan? That’s the part of this project I am most looking forward to. We are going show them how to do a good interpersonal communication training, how to provide counseling in a way that’s understandable and in a way that’s respectful. And we will build capacity as we do it.”
