5 key steps in mobilizing COVID-19 response efforts in Africa
The Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team (ECRT) was created on March 16, 2020, from a single tweet and has grown to over 1,400 volunteers from all over the world, spanning 15+ projects. Our two original workstreams: surveillance and awareness, have grown to seven workstreams including food delivery, DIY gear, and volunteer training (more details on each workstream will follow in subsequent posts). Our motto has been “Speed over perfection.” There’s no time to waste — every hour in every day counts.
Below are five key steps we took to get started. All our steps are available to any person or group, motivated to organize a similar response effort.
1. Find your allies— if you want to go far, go together
Our initial call to action was to create a simple Google form asking volunteers to submit basic info and a Github for team members to share open-source tools. We shared the form on all the platforms we could think of; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Friends shared it with other friends eventually, word spread far and wide.
Without social networks, the group would never have come together so quickly. To spread our message we started with those are the intersection of the solution we wanted to build. In this case, that group was the Ethiopians in the tech community. We reached out to existing organizations, such as Ethiopians in Tech, to get buy-in from leadership that would galvanize their communities through the network effect.
Once you’ve assembled a group, it’s likely that there are other groups who are also trying to help. Find them and figure out how to work with them efficiently, optimizing each other’s strengths. Currently, ECRT is working in collaboration with the Association of Ethiopian Broadcasters, the Association of Ethiopian Architects, and the Ethiopian Public Health Association and open to more! There is no time to reinvent the wheel.
Our awareness team developed content that can be shared in local languages on different social media accounts with the Ethiopia Ministry of Health approved messaging. To get the word out, we compiled a list of partners with existing followings across Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, and Twitter who agreed to participate in our campaign. Through our partners, our reach is over 12 million.
Going forward, we are partnering with manufacturers and importers on the ground with the capacity to source face masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE). We strongly believe that it’s better to amplify existing efforts through fundraising, distribution, and/or marketing before starting a duplicative initiative from scratch.
2. Establish a dedicated internal champion from a responsible government office to help coordinate
From the get-go, we had communication with the Ministry of Health and this has been critical. An internal champion is a specific person or dedicated group that can plug your organization into efforts on the ground. Leverage your team to make a connection either through personal networks or through social media. If you are unable to get an introduction, recruit more members until you have the right people.
Your internal champion can be on a local, regional, or national level. Once you have an established point of contact (POC) in the relevant government office, you can figure out what the high priority efforts are that will have the largest impact. Scope out your first task with them in detail and make sure it aligns with the existing skill sets on your team. Successful delivery of this first task is the first step in building the credibility and trust needed for your response efforts to be efficiently implemented.
3. Leverage existing open-source projects for gathering, visualizing, and disseminating data, and check if they’re already in use
There are a ton of open-source projects out there that can be helpful for government agencies and ministries in the context of the current pandemic. A few of the resources we initially found to help with COVID-19 responses are:
You can see a full comparison between the different options here (full blog post coming soon). One important thing to know before choosing a system, is “what is the government currently using?” We eventually learned that some of these tools were already in use which made the decision much easier.
4. Empower your volunteers to take action and ownership
For an organic group like this one that has grown from a few people to 1,400 within a few weeks, you can expect initial chaos.
Start onboarding with the self-starters who are able to build things from scratch and work with little-to-no guidance. They will serve as the initial leaders and will often lead the initiatives they proposed. You can spot them fairly easily: they drive things, recruit, and move their projects ahead with minimal input needed from you.
Soon, a few central workstreams where you dedicate most of your energy will emerge. At the same time, make sure to constantly communicate that you are open to new projects and ideas, but they need to be driven ideally by the one who suggested them.
One of the practices that paid off is our bi-weekly ‘all-hands’ call where teams share their progress updates, requirements, and resourcing needs for the following sprint. These calls serve as the primary source of information for newcomers (we make sure to share a recording of each call including notes). At the same time, it also serves as a platform to introduce “moonshots”, which are new projects that have not yet become part of the main workstreams. Moonshots graduate to a workstream if progress is quickly made and the team leader reliably and consistently delivers what they promise.
This hands-off approach — where every group is responsible for vision, strategy, execution, and recruitment — empowers volunteers to take ownership of their workstream and focus on the impact above all. The only common task force responsibility here is to communicate progress and needs on “all-hands” or “team lead”’ meetings.
In summary, make sure to have ‘all-hands’ calls, empower the self-starters, and focus on your central workstreams while allowing people to follow up on loose ends.
5. Use the right tools to organize
To bring together and organize volunteers we used a mix of the following free and donated tools:
- Slack
- Google Forms / Google Docs / Google Sheets
- GitHub
- Zoom
Slack is the main communication tool we use to organize. We started out with a few channels and eventually organized them around workstreams and projects for the most part. Slack is currently supporting any COVID-19 effort by giving out free upgrades.
Zoom is the video conferencing tool that we use for all meetings, which works particularly well for large groups of people. Zoom generously donated 10 free licenses to us and made to share unused licenses with other COVID-19 response teams.
We also created a GitHub Org for the group and created a simple ReadMe file that outlined all the basics about the effort we are organizing, including a link to the form and a way to join the new Slack group specifically for this effort. GitHub eventually became where we house all of the open-source code we have built or are currently building.
We use the entire G-Suite (Gdrive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, and Gcal) for meeting minutes, task tracking, and documenting any and all workstreams.
Be bold and ask platforms for service upgrades, as needed. We started doing this before many companies created free programs to support COVID related initiatives. At this point, most of them do, utilize them! They all want to do their part. We recommend reaching out on Twitter so they can RT and highlight their goodwill to their community.
Many factors contribute to a successful volunteer effort, including luck; however, these five tips comprise what strategies have helped us — or what we wished we knew — when we first started this journey. Organizing COVID-19 responses is not a small task but definitely one worth pursuing.
The Africa COVID-19 Response Toolkit is a blog published by the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team (ECRT).
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