Linguistic and communication exclusion in COVID-19 awareness campaigns in Malawi

Abstract

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has unravelled the significance of having robust communication structures about health and disease to dynamic societies. The need to construct a mutual understanding of health issues has become imperative, and achieving a universal understanding of the disease burden requires robust information-sharing processes which can easily surmount the barriers to communication. What is challenging, however, is to communicate in a way and in a language that the majority of the population understands. In Malawi, where the majority of the population (84 per cent) live in rural areas, and without access to information technologies, it becomes more challenging when devising messages that should reach such hard-to-reach populations. This therefore begs the question: how effective is the COVID-19 communication to the Malawi public domain? This article attempts to answer this question by discussing the language choice vis-à-vis the lingua-cultural needs of the masses in COVID-19 awareness, and the strategies and modes of communication in COVID-19 communication. In view of this, the article argues that the government communication strategies concerning COVID-19 were not entirely effective. The article notes that the use of English in most of the COVID-19 messages has excluded the majority and has perpetuated the attitude of perceiving COVID-19 as a disease for the rich people. The modes being used in communicating COVID-19 do not effectively reach the masses since the media penetration is minimal resulting in most Malawians getting second-hand information and developing myths and conspiracy theories. The article concludes that it is imperative for Malawi to devise a contextually appropriate framework for communicating complex health messages.