What’s a rural African village to do during COVID-19?

The remoteness of certain villages are currently a defense. But they could be a detriment in an outbreak.

Three years ago, I got to visit a remote Tanzanian area called Rombo. Looking at a map, it looks like it’s close to Mount Kilimanjaro, but the actual journey there makes it feel close to nothing.

To get there, we had to take an all-wheel drive jeep up some extremely steep slopes. You know those cartoons where a supervillain lives on top of a very pointy mountain, and to get to their lair you have to take this narrow path that keeps spiraling upward? That’s what driving on the rocky road to Rombo felt like. Except that narrow path would be bumpy with rocks and pits across the dirt road surface. The whole vehicle bumped and vibrated on its way up.

When we got to the village, community members rushed out towards us. They were holding and waving palm fronds, singing to us in Swahili and cheering at the top of their lungs. Tanzanian culture is extremely hospitable and puts an emphasis on welcoming people, but if I didn’t know any better, I would think they were cheering on our long trek up the mountain.

This summer, I was supposed to visit another remote community. One in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this time. I already started planning how to get there. My trip would start with an international border crossing by land, a five hour drive to the nearest small town, and then hours of steep hiking on foot to get to the village.

Of course, that trip has been cancelled by COVID-19. Or postponed, I prefer to say.

I visit these places because I love them. I also visit them for work. My work with Plant With Purpose allows me to meet the people who are on the front lines of fighting climate change. They often live in countries like Tanzania or DR Congo. Their communities revolve around agriculture. Most of them lack healthy land, which is why these sorts of rural populations represent 85% of people in poverty around the world.

Plant With Purpose aims to help these communities by forming groups where they can develop sustainable farming skills, land management plans, and economic empowerment. Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to meet in over a month. Mass tree planting events haven’t been able to go on as scheduled. My colleagues working overseas have largely been confined to their homes as well.

The coronavirus is disruptive there like it is here. But over there, people’s lives were already full of challenges.

As of mid-April, there are around 20,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Africa, and testing is severely limited. A lot of talk has emerged lately about what things would look like if COVID-19 outbreaks were to strike the developing world. As of right now, around 80% of known active COVID-19 cases are in the United States and Europe. But that could change. If the disease spreads into Africa, what would happen?

It wouldn’t be good. The World Economic Forum described Africa as a “ticking time-bomb to defuse.”

My friends in these communities are at a high risk. Malnutrition, untreated illnesses, and underlying health conditions are common. I also think of the homes that many of them live in and how difficult their arrangements would make it to self-isolate.

Perhaps one of their biggest risk factors is the lack of access to medical care and hospital infrastructure. I have no idea how long it would take to get from Rombo to the nearest hospital. I do know that the largest city in the Eastern Congo has 24 ICU beds. South Sudan only has four ventilators. Liberia only has three.

I must note that Africa does have some unique resilience factors as well. Its population, for starters, is on average much younger than the United States’ or Europe. The average African tends to travel between cities a lot less frequently than the average American, European, or even Chinese citizen, which further reduces risk. It’s also worth noting that one of the countries that has had the most success at limiting the spread of the virus and caring for its patients has been Rwanda. They aren’t getting enough attention for it. But we can balance these reasons to be optimistic alongside our valid reasons to be concerned.

Right now, their best defense is their remote locations. 

I think of that bumpy road to Rombo, or that on-foot journey through the Congo in a whole new light now. Those treacherous and extremely inconvenient journeys might ultimately help stop the virus from getting there. We asked all our colleagues to halt travel into remote villages to avoid potentially bringing in the disease.

(Now is probably a good time to note that it’s not just Africa where we work, but also Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Thailand. But the same dynamics apply.)

The most important thing for us to do right now is to continue to keep the virus out of the villages where we work.

The next thing is to prepare our partnering communities for what’s next.

Plant With Purpose values its relationships with each of the communities it serves. We’ve worked hard to earn the trust of community members. As the outbreak spread, we knew we would have some opportunity to help, but we need to think through what that would look like.

I’ll spare all the details of what happened next, but basically, I made phone calls. Emails were sent back and forth between the U.S. and Canada and the Dominican Republic and Tanzania and so on. I hopped on Zoom meetings. More phone calls. Emails again. And on the other side of it all was the birth of one of the more unique campaigns I’ve ever been a part of.

We launched the Readiness and Resilience Fund. What makes this campaign especially unique was that rather than raising funds for a specifically mapped-out project, we are building a contingency fund to be used in the best way possible depending on what’s to happen.

We realized that there were three scenarios we needed to prepare for: The one we’re in, the one we want to avoid, and the one we’ll face soon enough.

Scenario One: Where we are

Right now we’re at a point where COVID-19 is present in each* of the countries where we work, but outbreaks haven’t happened in our communities.

Our mission right now is to do everything within our power to keep the disease out of these areas.

Based on some of the places I’ve described, that might seem easy enough. Who’s going to be scaling mountains and walking 10K to a village at a time like this?

Well, many of the people who are from these communities but moved to big cities for work might. During the 2010 earthquake, many Haitians in Port Au Prince sought refuge in the country’s rural areas. That would be much more dangerous when it’s a pandemic, rather than a natural disaster, that creates this movement.

The other challenge is making sure all our communities have the right information to combat the disease. Many of our communities include marginalized populations, so literacy and language may be issues in making sure they actually have appropriate access to this information.

Right now, the fund helps us adapt to being able to address these needs.

We’ve put our heads together with other nonprofits to share resources with our community groups about how to best implement social distancing guidelines. We’ve also started using our very localized connections to make sure important information gets out to each community.

Scenario Two: What we hope doesn’t happen

The worst case scenario would be an outbreak in one of our communities.

I’ve already mentioned the heightened risk factors. The impossibility of properly self-isolating in a village setting if you get sick. The shortage of proper medical equipment and treatment facilities.

In this scenario there simply wouldn’t be much we could immediately do. We couldn’t suddenly build an adequate hospital in a remote village during a crisis. We’d be relying on investments we’ve already made in local resilience.

Of course, we would still pray for opportunities to do something. If a localized effort pops up that we could support, we’d gladly throw our weight behind it. We’ve already formed partnerships with local health organizations to be able to do that quickly if needed. But hopefully not.

Scenario Three: The inevitable aftermath

People aren’t talking about this threat nearly as much right now, but they will soon enough.

This pandemic has sunk the global economy. And these rural villages are going to really suffer as a result.

We have a historical reason to see this coming. As recently as 2008, the mega-recession caused a spike in food prices in places with already low food security. In short, poverty got a lot worse in places that already had it pretty bad.

Communities like Rombo represent the foundation of the world’s food supply. And that’s one thing that has been drastically rocked by the pandemic. Coffee growers in Tanzania who used to be able to sell their produce to a co-op for it to eventually make its way to the United States are seeing radical shifts in the demand for their products. In some instances, demand shrinks, lowering the value of their goods.

Even the simple act of buying food has become difficult.

In the Congo, many people buy their food needs at local outdoor markets, which have effectively been closed down for the time being. If you live in a remote village, your one means of food is now what you’re able to grow. Thankfully, we’ve been working to help people grow one extra meal a day through our environmental work. But it’s still a challenge.

I believe the work Plant With Purpose does is already one of the most ideal and sustainable solutions to extreme poverty and food insecurity. An amplified version of our typical approach can help restore food security and economic health rapidly. That means fewer people going hungry in the short term.

After Haiti’s earthquake, we put together a cash-for-work program there that provided people with immediate access to funds for performing essential tasks to get things back up and running. In Thailand, we’re helping people adjust what they farm to produce crops that grow quickly enough to feed people with urgency.

I think this is where we’ll have the best impact.

Here’s a map of how that might look

We’re in the process of raising $400,000 to be used in response to COVID-19. How it’ll be used will depend on how the three scenarios I describe unfold. In short, it may be used for:

• Scenario One: Spreading accurate and accessible information, helping groups adapt to social distancing

• Scenario Two: Emergency procedures that are appropriate and necessary, working with local health organizations to respond to immediate needs

• Scenario Three: Rebuilding local economies and solving the immediate problem of food shortages

This isn’t the easiest time to be launching a campaign to raise $400,000. Much of my team isn’t totally sure where that’ll come from. It’s a big number for a time when millions of people lose their jobs each week. But I believe in this campaign, and I think enough people will too so that small gifts will add up. And they’ll go a really long way in a place like Rombo.

For more information on the Readiness & Resilience Fund, visit the Plant With Purpose site. And if you’re able to help… please do! Our help is needed now more than ever.

Disclaimer 1: Even though I work for Plant With Purpose and regularly write content with a similar focus to this, I’m writing this particular piece from my personal POV. You can find stuff written from a more formal voice standpoint here.

Disclaimer 2: Technically, there’s one country we work in with no confirmed cases, but it also hasn’t done much testing.

Note: Photos from Tanzania are mostly by me, photos from DR Congo are by my friend Jared