Exploring Sub-Saharan Africa’s Communication of COVID-19-Related Health Information on Social Media

Social media presents a robust stage for disseminating time-sensitive information that is needed during a public health disease of global concern such as COVID-19. This study finds out how the 23 anglophone Sub-Saharan African countries’ national health ministries and infectious disease agencies disseminated COVID-19 related information through their social media accounts within the first three months after the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. COVID-19 related qualitative and quantitative data types were collected from the social media accounts of the surveyed national health ministries and agencies for analysis. Over 86% of the African countries had presence on social media; Facebook was the most popular, though Twitter contained more posts. One of the credibility issues that was noticed is that most of the health ministries’ and agencies’ social media accounts were unverified and access to the social media accounts was not provided on most of their official websites. Information dissemination became more deliberate and increased significantly after the announcement of the fist cases of COVID-19 in the countries under review. Awareness creation, updates and news constituted the major categories of information that were disseminated, mostly in the form of derivative social media information before the announcement of the first COVID-19 case in the surveyed African countries. Campaigns against misinformation were barely undertaken by most of the countries. Strategies used by some countries included the employment of social media influencers and creation of content in local languages. Strategies that include development of health information content that targets different groups in African societies and the inclusion of elderly in the community and religious leaders as non-state actors in health information communication were recommended.