Involving young girls to take the lead in our community campaigns against ebola in Ituri-DRC

Training of Community Mobilizers to create awareness about Ebola in Ituri: Placing young girls at the Center of our community engagement against Ebola

On Tuesday September 15^th, 2026 we held a training of the first 10 young girls who will be involved in community campaigns against Ebola in Ituri Province.

Posing for a group photo after the training in Shari in Buria, Ituri Province who were trained a a team from UNDP.

With financial support from “GlobalGiving” and “we are purposeful”, we have innovated our community approach, instead of deploying men, women and young boys who were easily available in our different activities, we have now put in place a team of 10 young girls who are going to be involved in community activities mainly awareness against Ebola in Ituri.

This is because we realized the gaps to make our approach inclusive by involving all the categories of the communities especially young people and among them young girls, we also observed the need to define who should carry the message and how best to deliver this message against Ebola and realized that young women and girls are still ignorant about Ebola and often do not attend community initiatives.

However they have their own ways of coming together and in this way we should have in place fellow young people to engage with them. And lastly in Ituri we have a big number of women and young girls active in the sector of commercial sex and even survival sex and this category of women are often stigmatized in the communities and because what they do is considered as against the norms, they do hide and often do not associate with other community members. This goes beyond in order to interact with all other sexual minorities such as LGBTI Community among others.

Unfortunately actors such as World Health Organization and the Government are telling us about the statistics of Ebola infections but they are not giving us more information about the mostly affected categories of people, currently we know now that women are more victims of Ebola compared to the time when it started and this is because of so many factors including limited access to information, vulnerability and other social injustices women have faced.

We are so proud to take the lead involving women driving campaign against Ebola, this is unique so far in Ituri and we hope to amplify it in many other areas including others provinces once the funds are available. Making women drivers of this campaign needs funding because these young girls are financially too vulnerable in order to take up their own initiatives.