RiT Humanitarian Bulletin: Issue 2

This Humanitarian Bulletin is an analytical product that aims to provide humanitarian and health organizations with an in-depth contextual analysis on rumor trends, the ‘why’ behind rumors, their potential impacts on communities and humanitarian programming as well as recommendations on how they can better address the rumors.

The purpose of this bulletin is to help mitigate the spread of rumors and misinformation about the COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe. It seeks to provide health and humanitarian organizations with rumor trends identified through systematic collection and analysis of social media listening data and face-to- face feedback from communities. Rumor trends and analysis endeavor to help humanitarian actors and health workers better inform their Risk Communication & Community Engagement (RCCE) strategies.

Rumors in this bulletin were collected by Internews Zimbabwe’s social media monitors from March 1, 2022, to March 26, 2022. Overall, Internews identified 244 rumors from various posts and comments from Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. The selection of featured rumors is based on a risk assessment matrix that accounts for the rumor’s frequency in discussions or social media engagements and its potential impact in the community.

Access the full publication here (727KB PDF)

Source: Internews