COVID COMMS

COVID Comms was formed in March 2020 to assist in the national effort to communicate the dangers of COVID-19 and to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. For more than a year, the skilled communications professionals in the team worked voluntarily, until a grant from the Solidarity Fund allowed the organization to formalise and expand its operations.

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID Comms has distributed free, accessible and easily understood public health material, translated into all the languages in South Africa, to combat the pandemic.

Accurate and useful information about the COVID-19 pandemic has become essential to combat misinformation, fear and suspicion and to build confidence in the measures to contain the pandemic and protect lives and social and economic activities. If society is to avoid recurring mutations of the virus and successive waves of infection and death it is necessary to support public health messaging that promotes the preventive measures: vaccination, sanitizing, social distance and wearing masks.

COVID Comms plays a critical role in countering the mass of lies and distortion spread on media platforms by providing a credible source of rational argument and accurate information to reassure the population of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for COVID-19 and encourage acceptance.

COVID Comms works in two core focus areas:

Communication: They have produced more than 300 information products, distributed through civil society, labour, business and government networks - most of them translated into many of the recognized South African languages. Their products are distributed on social media platforms, WhatsApp and mainstream media.

Contact: They have run more than 100 community workshops to stimulate vaccine demand among young South Africans, and more than 500 were scheduled before the end of June 2022. The workshops take place in all provinces of South Africa, through community partners using local languages and achieving a national reach.

Claude Leon Foundation has contributed generously to the workshop programme in 2022.