At the end of 2019, a novel coronavirus was identified as the cause of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China. It rapidly spread, resulting in an epidemic. Throughout China, followed by a global pandemic. In February 2020, the World Health Organization designated the disease COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019, a global pandemic. Understanding of COVID-19 is evolving. Covid-19 guidance and protocols have been issued by the World Health Organization and by the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This global pandemic has affected everyone regardless of age, nature of work as well as our socio-economic well-being. People have had to adapt to new ways of doing things in response to the pandemic. Globally, as of 10th December 2020, the total number of cases reported for COVID-19 was 69 million, with 44.4million recovered cases and 1.57million deaths. By the same time, Zambia had recorded a total of 18,062 cases with 17,295 of those cases recovering while 364 people have died to COVID-19. Against this background, FDI initiated a COVID-19 response to respond to this pandemic by streamlining our COVID-19 response in all our programming. For the past 2 years, FDI has embarked on a number of initiatives to combat the pandemic which include: i) Using district structures including Imams to sensitize their communities with credible sources of information on
COVID-19 with the aim of countering myths and fake news that had caused panic and fear in the targeted communities; ii) Printing posters with different messages on the COVID-19 protocols in 4 local languages namely, Ki Kaonde, Tonga, Nyanja and English which were distributed in various public places across the districts of operation; iii) Supporting over 300 families with different Covid-19 hampers iv) Procuring WASH infrastructure which is placed in various strategic places. This is done in partnership with the Local Government in various districts; v) Procuring and distributing facemasks, gloves, gowns which were distributed in the targeted Mosques and other vulnerable communities.
As the virus continued to spread during various waves, and after noticing that people had become complacent, FDI in late 2021 re-launched its COVID-19 efforts leveraging social media to increase awareness of the pandemic under a new project brand “COVID IKALIKO!”.