Foot soldier’s boots on ground against the Infodemics within the underserved communities.

Our team on ground promoting vaccination, Training and sensitizing communities about its life changing benefits. Our major challenge is mobility from one place to another. Lend us a hand in our effort to acquire a Mini-van (Vehicle) to ease and widen our coverage.

Transportation barriers are often cited as barriers to underserved communities and healthcare access. Transportation barriers lead to rescheduled or missed appointments, delayed or missed workshop attendance. These consequences may lead to poorer management of a project implementation and thus failures in achieving its goals.

The project is aimed at scaling up the community’s perspective towards vaccines which prevent diseases like covid-19, tetanus, Hepatitis B, Rubella and measles among others. Although these diseases are potentially dangerous to human beings and pause potential dangers and deaths. A number of people in the grassroots communities don’t believe in getting vaccinated against these diseases due to myths, wrong information and ignorance.
This project will, therefore.

• Advocate for attitude change towards vaccines.
• Ensure that grass root people are equipped with the relevant evidence based credible and factual information and messages about vaccines.

The project implementation shall be in 3 perspectives: Community, Institutions and Individual/ beneficiary perspective. These interventions will be implemented while observing the current SOPs set by the Ugandan government and where possible, virtual meetings will be held.

Who will benefit from the Project? 

Target groups: Children (12 years and below), Youth (13 to 30 years).

The project will benefit orphans 12 years and below who are underserved and whose parents died of HIV/AIDS, young adults/ youth who range between 13 to 30 years, and People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), the project will also target their families, guardians, relatives and caregivers. Other beneficiaries from the project include the key and priority population, especially those residing in the fishing community of Buikwe district. The project targets a total of 5000 beneficiaries within six months.

We face communication challenges as a result of differing perceptions. Perceptions that are greatly influenced by cultural, educational and even economic backgrounds. This influence is not factual nor is it scientific and must change.

The onus is on us to impact and cause a total mindset change in our communities and the world over. With Perception checking, we get to understand and appreciate the individual differences in persons, regions, communities, cultures and all social economic attributes that affect how we perceive different situations or concepts. Perception checking is a cooperative approach to communication. An approach we should employ to be able to demystify and simply facts about vaccines and immunization as a whole.

The masses, Political leaders, legislators, religious and cultural leaders must be made to wholly embrace these interventions of vaccination if we are to overcome such pandemics. We must outweigh the negative autosuggestions that are registered subconsciously in our minds. (I.e., no need for latrines in our homes, herbal can cure any type of disease, HIV/AIDS is a punishment, I don’t need vaccines, I have strong genes, my forefathers were not vaccinated, everyone will die at one time, it’s a ploy for governments to control us, its business for tycoons and by big pharmaceuticals. etc.). We outweigh the negative and suppress it with the positive.

Considering ourselves at the forefront in this initiative, we are equipped with evidence based credible information, wide range knowledge about how to impact communities to adopt the health lifestyle behaviors most importantly with the clear understanding of the target audience’s position or state with regard to vaccines. Our target communities must find reliability, credibility and apparentness in the rationale. The reasons and objectives we use while approaching them are evidence based, believable and convincing. With this arsenal in our hands, we truly will positively change the perception and build vaccine confidence.

Vaccine skepticism and mistrust has become a major hindrance to the fight against the health emergency. There are not only rising virus skeptics, but Anti-vaccine Movements or “anti-vaxxers”. In Uganda and most African countries, the conspiracy theory that proposes that the COVID-19 vaccines are aimed at hurting people of African descent is widely spread, while another section of the community is concerned about the aftereffects of vaccines considered to be an ad hoc treatment for a global pandemic. In Christian communities, the “666” sentiment is fast spreading, with believers connecting COVID-19 vaccines to the sign of the beast. Young people are especially hesitant to take the COVID-19 vaccines due to the misinformation that young people possess stronger natural immunity and are most likely to survive COVID-19 consequences. Another larger section of the youth globally was concerned about the safety of the vaccines (UCSF, 2021).