Giving Compass' Take:

• Caroline Walker discusses her experience working with sexual violence outreach in Nigeria where language and cultural barriers are a major obstacle to finding survivors. 

• How do communications barriers undermine potentially effective programs? What support do health workers need to ensure their messages are understood? 

• Learn more about the importance of communication in collaboration. 

For the last six months, I’ve been working in Nigeria with MSF. You can’t help but think about language in work and life here.

For most of my time in Nigeria, I have been working as the outreach manager for an MSF sexual violence project in the southern city of Port Harcourt.

Port Harcourt is in Rivers State, known for its diversity of language and culture.

Our logistics manager was from Niger, to the north, and could talk to groups of Hausa speakers about our services. However, the most commonly understood language is Pidgin English which led us to the implement a successful radio awareness campaign about MSF services on a popular Pidgin channel. But still, from talking to the outreach team, I know there are parts of the city where people speak a different dialect and so would not necessarily understand everything.

From my experience in Port Harcourt (and from also working on MSF’s sexual violence project in the city of Rustenburg in South Africa), there are many factors that make it difficult or sometimes impossible for people to seek medical care after experiencing a rape.

The word “rape” itself could be one. The outreach team is sensitive to this when talking to groups of people in a market, school or church. What if someone defines rape differently from how MSF defines it?

While in Port Harcourt someone said to me, “it’s very rare for an adult to be raped.” In order for an adult to be raped, he said, there would need to be “force,” “guns” or “sharp objects.” If someone’s experience didn’t fit that category of assault, how would they know that they could seek help?

Read the full article about discussing sexual violence by Caroline Walker at Doctors Without Borders.