Outbreak Preparedness & Response
The ongoing Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda hits close to home — these are contexts where RIL has active projects and deep partnerships. It speaks directly to what RIL exists to do: support the humanitarian system to respond better, faster, and more effectively. This page brings together innovations and resources from our work: a curation of lessons learned that we hope will be useful to the wider response community.
Innovation | Adaptive Response Messaging (ARM)
The Challenges It Tackles: Typically, during responses, many different actors —Government, NGOs, INGOs, Civil Society, and multi-lateral institutions—are sending out uncoordinated messaging around prominent issues that affect their lives. In addition, at times, myths of what can and cannot be done emerge sometimes born out of fear, misinformation, or cultural and religious ideas.
The Solution: The ARM is a “process” innovation model and establishes a new way of coordinated response-time messaging that applies. The process establishes a singular focused message broadcast across multiple mediums through multiple partners, thus the messaging is unbranded to remove any barriers. Additionally, messages are targeted to key messages for particular messaging groups called “narrowcasting”. As the messages are broadcast across multiple mediums, through many partners, the audiences hear a singular voice on messaging both for prevention, actions, and response.