Importance of Community-Level Interventions During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Community-level strategies are important in ensuring adequate control of disease outbreaks especially in sub-Saharan African countries. Learning from public health responses to previous infectious disease outbreaks is important in shaping these responses to COVID-19. This study aims to highlight and summarize the evidence from community-level interventions during infectious disease outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We conducted a scoping review of published literature on community-level interventions and strategies adopted in different infectious disease outbreaks in SSA. To obtain relevant studies, we searched EMBASE, CINAHL, MEDLINE, and Google Scholar in August 2020. Our search was based on the combination of keywords such as coronavirus, flu, Ebola, community, rural, strategies, impact, effectiveness, feasibility, Africa, developing countries, and SSA. Studies that met the inclusion criteria were selected and synthesized under the following distinct themes: health education, sensitization, and communications; surveillance; and service delivery. Our review highlights community-based strategies that have been tried and tested with varying outcomes for different outbreaks in different sub-Saharan African communities, we believe they will inform the selection of strategies to adopt in managing the COVID-19 pandemic at the community level. The important aspects of these strategies were highlighted, requirements for successful implementation and the possible challenges that might be encountered were also discussed. Achieving control of the COVID-19 pandemic in sub-Saharan African communities, will require concerted community-based and community-led strategies, which in turn rely on the availability of necessary socioeconomic resources, and the contextual adaption of these interventions.