The COVID-19 pandemic has touched nearly every person on the globe, from nurses in hospitals, to adolescents struggling under lockdown, to parents working at home while also educating their young children. From the beginning, two facts have been clear to us at Every Woman Every Child: first, the pandemic represents an unprecedented threat to the core focus of the EWEC movement, which is the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents worldwide; and second: finding solutions to the crisis will require many different groups working together.
Accurate, helpful information is needed now more than ever, but instead misinformation and rumors crowd social media.
Working together with the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) and other partners in government, civil society, and the private sector, EWEC is making crucial information available on how to prevent the spread of the virus and manage its secondary impacts. A key part of our strategy is thinking critically about how we can target people of many different demographics—communication professionals, health professionals, communities, young people, pregnant women and their families—and the forms of outreach that are the the most helpful.
In March, EWEC started a COVID-19 expert video series hosted on our YouTube page. We choose to produce videos because, in a time of worldwide isolation, seeing faces and hearing voices might be a source of comfort. Followers can hear from public health and programming experts who answer high-level questions about the state of the pandemic and what’s next. Each week, we post a new video. So far, featured interviewees have included experts from GAVI, the International Pediatric Association, UNICEF, and Core Group. The topics covered in the video series include the vaccine supply chain, family planning, commitment and accountability during the crisis, and advocacy fundraising. The audience for our video series is the general public who might be overwhelmed by the amount of COVID-19 news and want to hear from a trusted source.
Staying true to our focus on women and children, EWEC also participated in the recent global call to action for the International Day of the Midwife, hosting the launch on our website and producing videos and two original interviews to center the importance of pregnancy and birth services during this time. Our interview with Sally Pairman, Chief Executive of the International Confederation of Midwives, touches on important points of advocacy such as the shortage of personal protective equipment for midwives, and the importance of midwives being included in the decision-making process.
One important, and often overlooked group are adolescents. Though they are less at risk of serious complications from COVID-19, adolescents can still struggle with mental health and loneliness during the quarantine. Adolescents are less likely to be following our videos and social media, so we needed a different strategy to reach them. To serve the needs of adolescents, EWEC partnered with Unitaid and the MTV Staying Alive Foundation to produce a 60-series of the MTV Shuga franchise, called MTV Shuga Alone Together. The episodes—filmed by actors in four different countries, who themselves are under lockdown—focus not only on hygiene best practices, but on the emotional challenges during this time.
“It doesn’t matter who you are. I think all of us are frightened,” MTV Staying Alive Foundation executive director Georgia Arnold said. “It is talking about the mental health issues, the threat of domestic violence, and addressing all of the myths around [COVID-19].”
Every Woman Every Child has never worked alone. EWEC was founded in 2010 to be an amplifier for many different groups working on the well-being of women, children, and adolescents. We have always served as a knowledge hub and during this time, use our website to host COVID-19 resources. Finally, we continue to have advocacy calls with over 1000 partners, have a week-in-review summary bulletin reaching 2000 partners, are starting to work with social media influencers to spread our message, and do outreach on our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.