Ebola: How a people’s science helped end an epidemic

What lessons can we learn from using local knowledge in countries like Sierra Leone to combat past epidemics like the Ebola outbreak and the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
When an Ebola outbreak swept across West Africa in 2013, claiming thousands of lives in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the international community was gripped by hysteria. Experts grimly predicted that millions would be infected within months. Yet by the middle of 2014, the disease was already going into decline in Africa itself. So why did outside observers get it so wrong?
In this episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast IDS Research Officer Catherine Grant from the IDS-led Pandemic Preparedness project talks to Paul Richards an anthropologist with over forty-five years’ experience of living and working in West Africa and author of the book Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic.
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