Khoybor Ali does not let his disability get in his way. He drives an auto-rickshaw taxi using his crutch. The little income he earns supports his entire family. Khoybor lives in a small community of ten households. There is one room for each household. They all share one kitchen and two washrooms. Khoybor lives there with his pregnant wife, six year-old daughter, plus his younger brother and his wife.

The cramped living conditions mean that contagious diseases such as COVID-19 can spread quickly. Khoybor’s younger brother Nasir was the first one in their living quarters to show symptoms, with mild fever, cough, and body aches.

Khoybor knew who to turn to for help. Two people had visited just a few days earlier, enquiring if anyone had symptoms of the disease.

Sakhawat Alam and Muhammad Roman Mia work as COVID-19 Community Support Team (CST) volunteers for the Dhaka North City Corporation. After receiving a three-day training from FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) programme, Sakhawat and Roman started visiting households.

 “People like us cannot afford to go to the hospital or see doctors,” Khoybor said. “The CST people came to our place, examined Nasir, and connected us with a doctor over the phone. The doctor prescribed medicine that helped Nasir recover. The people from CST explained to us the importance of staying home, wearing a mask, and washing our hands. We were also given masks and food support that helped us through the 14 days that we needed to stay home.”

Khoybor explained that people in their community do not own smartphones or laptops so they were unable to register for the COVID-19 vaccine being provided by the Government of Bangladesh. He is grateful to the CST initiative for offering assistance with registration so that people like him are also able to receive the vaccination. “It was because of CST that my brother recovered quickly and we were able to keep from spreading the virus.”

CST is a community-based intervention to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Bangladesh.

The CST initiative, funded by the World Bank Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and FCDO, is an innovative intervention of the Government of Bangladesh, as a part of its Preparedness and Response Plan for COVID-19 (BPRP). Leveraging extensive experience in community-based approaches to mitigating epidemics in animals through the ECTAD programme, FAO has played an instrumental role in  designing the CST intervention and provides ongoing technical support for monitoring CST implementation and evaluating its epidemiological impact. This interagency collaboration between the government, UN agencies (FAO, UNFPA, UNICEF, WFP), NGO (BRAC) and volunteer organizations (Platform, Himu, Young Bangla), and the donor community, encompasses diverse expertise for providing targeted health support to combat COVID-19 in communities through a needs-based and risk-based approach that is sensitive to gender, health status, and socio-economic differences.

Since being piloted and launched in June last year, 1,825,424 households across Dhaka North and Dhaka South City Corporations, like that of Khoybor’s, have been visited by FAO-trained CSTs. Out of the 1,825,424 households across DNCC and DSCC, 207,663 suspected cases were screened, of which 54,508 were identified as having signs and symptoms consistent with COVID-19. At the beginning of January 2021, a second phase of the programme began with a more targeted approach to reducing COVID-19 mortality by incorporating additional services to identify and protect vulnerable individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease. Where low-income, marginalised families were previously faced with significant accessibility and technological challenges in completing registration for vaccination, CSTs are also now supporting families like Khoybor’s to register for COVID-19 vaccination via Bangladesh’s online registration system. A CST-dedicated telemedicine system was also set up under coordination of DGHS with technical support from FAO and UNFPA, providing toll-free numbers and a hotline to support symptomatic individuals and a separate hotline to support women of reproductive age for any sexual and reproductive health or gender-based violence issues providing comprehensive counselling, consultation and referrals to appropriate health facilities.