Communication to Promote Healthy Behaviors in Urban Slums in Kenya During COVID-19

Sub-Saharan Africa contains many densely overcrowded and poor urban slums at high risk of COVID-19 outbreaks. In these contexts, sanitation and social distancing measures are near impossible, and COVID-19's rapid spread is a devastating prospect. To control the pandemic's spread, the Kenyan Ministry of Health COVID-19 Taskforce has implemented initial prevention and mitigation measures. To inform the Taskforce strategy, this study will deploy rapid phone-based surveys every two weeks on knowledge, attitudes and practices to approximately 7,500 heads of household sampled from existing randomized evaluation cohorts across five urban slums in Nairobi. Baseline findings on awareness of COVID-19 symptoms, perceived risk, awareness of and ability to carry out preventive behaviors, misconceptions, and fears will inform Taskforce interventions. In subsequent rounds, behavior change messages will be randomly assigned to measure effectiveness, or if randomization is not feasible, survey questions on exposure and response to government campaigns will be evaluated using causal inference approaches.