The Ivorian association in the Toronto region has been stepping up its efforts for the past few days to encourage vaccination, which is still not very popular in the community, in particular because of the language barrier. After an awareness campaign featuring Ivorian diplomacy, the association is now counting on the creation of a French-speaking mobile vaccination clinic in Toronto to reverse the trend.
The Association of the Ivorian Community of the Toronto Region (ACIRT) is teaming up with TAIBU, an organization based in the Scarborough district, to set up the mobile unit. Ahmat Hassane Tchanaye, who works on the organization of mobile clinics for TAIBU, thinks that the creation of one of them could convince the last undecided. “The language barrier poses a lot of problems,” he sums up. The ACIRT is currently looking for the ideal location.
Carole Gballou, the president of the association, estimates that only half of the approximately 1,600 members of the community are vaccinated. The province’s “all-English” message encouraging vaccination, she says, does not appear to have influenced the decision-making of Ivorians in Toronto. “I believe that the government’s message is getting through, but it may be going differently in our community, because it does not feel concerned,” notes Ms.me Gballou.
The president decided to take matters into her own hands after learning at the association’s end-of-year gala — where participants were to be double-vaccinated — that several families had still not received their two doses. She first posted a video on the ACIRT Facebook page on January 13 in which she revealed that “over a dozen Ivorian families [avaient] been infected with COVID-19 since the beginning of the year”. Some were in intensive care.
Then a week later, on January 22, the president called on Ivory Coast’s honorary consul in Toronto, Peter Dawes, to reiterate the importance of the vaccine. “For the love of your family, your community and your country, get vaccinated,” the consul said. “It’s not that people are opposed to vaccines, but rather that they are afraid and that the danger has not been explained to them sufficiently,” he suggests on the phone.
Soon, the Ivorian ambassador in Ottawa will publish his own message on the Facebook page. “These videos show that we care about the community,” says Carole Gballou.
Remove Barriers
TAIBU provides a turnkey service for the organization of community mobile clinics in the Toronto area, as soon as a community finds a place and that it is large enough to accommodate the facilities. The organization has the necessary equipment and more importantly in the case of the ACIRT, its own team of vaccinators, awareness agents and French-speaking volunteers. TAIBU can thus vaccinate between 700 and 900 people per day.
The organization has already done the exercise with other cultural communities since the start of the pandemic, but no French-speaking community had so far expressed its interest. “It could be explained by the language barrier. There are also other beliefs that I will not mention in their place,” notes the TAIBU representative. It is for these reasons that the organization uses religious leaders, for example, to create the clinics. “They can demystify what is mentioned by the population,” recalls Ahmat Hassane Tchanaye.
Carole Gballou is trying to find an ideal vaccination site that can be offered to TAIBU, a complicated exercise given the scattering of the Ivorian diaspora in the greater Toronto area. Sanitary restrictions also mean that several places are not available. “We called and called everywhere,” she says of the efforts of the small ACIRT team. To make matters worse, a church in the center of the city, which was considered a potential place to host the clinic, has just suffered a flood.
Difficult communication
It is difficult to determine, at the scale of the Toronto region, the number of communities that are in the same situation as that of Carole Gballou. No public health unit in the region routinely collects socio-demographic data on vaccination. The immunization rate put forward by the president of the ACIRT is therefore approximate. According to some experts, the lack of data complicates the deployment of vaccination.
Some public health units give the clinics they manage surveys containing questions on the socio-demographic profile of patients, but the latter complete them voluntarily. The data is then deposited in COVAx, a database of the Ministry of Health in Ontario. The Ministry of Health did not respond to questions from the Duty regarding the use and management of data.
Carole Gballou deplores the lack of access to data. “If at least we had data [le message] would be more meaningful,” she says. “The mere fact of saying that more than ten families had been infected opened our eyes,” explains the president of the ACIRT.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.