WW: The information related to the spread and management of COVID-19 has often been from the position of leaders speaking to the citizenry or directing particular insitutions/entities. The nature of the communication has tended to be top-down and:
- informative (e.g. sharing the symptoms of COVID-19 and how to avoid infection);
- authoritarian/authoritative (e.g. curfew hours, lockdown of certain areas, etc);
- prescriptive (e.g. how sectors such as education should be run in the wake of the pandemic, etc).
However, in this article, a citizens' group proposes a different model of government engagement by calling for a participatory approach. The call comes from a civil society group that works in Mathare, a low-income residential area that has often suffered from harsh government actions and edicts, including reported incidences of extra-judicial killings at the hands of the police. The residents of Mathare also tend to earn low incomes, making the government's calls for social distancing and remote working very removed from the Mathare residents' reality.
