Community informatics for sustainable management of pandemics in developing countries: A case study of COVID-19 in Nigeria

Abstract

Although a significant number of the human population in developing countries live in urban communities, majority of the population lives in rural areas. Developing countries, especially in their rural areas, suffer from a lack of healthcare facilities, poverty and high rate of illiteracy. Motivated by the huge socio-economic gap between the developed and the developing worlds, there have been several studies into the COVID-19 pandemic management in developing countries. However, none of these research works emphasised the health cultural beliefs of any developing economy as a basis for their recommendations. Specifically, this paper discusses the pandemic situation in Nigeria with emphasis on the prevalent health cultural beliefs of the citizens of the country, especially those living in rural communities. This is important because each local community defines a socio-ecological cluster of people who are more tightly knitted together in terms of language, relationship, culture, religion, social amenities, business, leadership and so on. As such, there is a need to prepare the socio-ecological units to be more resistant to the spread of the virus; a weaker social-ecological unit will entail a higher risk of community transmissions. With respect to the peculiarity of each local community, this paper recommends strategies for controlling and managing the pandemic in Nigeria using community informatics or grass-root computing. We argue that community informatics can empower and support policy makers and governments of developing countries such as Nigeria in combating and effectively managing a pandemic.