In 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo experienced its tenth episode of Ebola virus disease. This disease appeared in the east of the country, in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri; and, it was one of the longest and most devastating in Africa. Announced in 2018, its end was officially declared in 2020 with a case fatality rate of around 70%.

Most cases of contagion or even death have been the result of the population denying the existence of the disease, mistrust of caregivers and of the care being administered. In general, the episode was characterized by resistance and violence. Beyond the trauma already endured, this resistance would was a reaction to the altogether original and strange methods adopted by the response team to break the chain of contamination and end the disease.

In order to find out what explains this resistance and how to make the process of response human, Pole Institute and its partner, Martin Luther University, initiated, under the funding of Elrha’s “Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises” (R2HC) program, conducted a research entitled « “Humanizing the Design of the Ebola Response in DRC: Anthropological Research on Humane Designs of Ebola Treatment and Care to Build Trust for Better Health”

The results of this purely qualitative research derive from 76 semi-structured individual interviews with key informants and 28 focus group discussions. The duration of each interview or group discussion was about twenty to sixty minutes. In addition, twenty field notes were collected. Ethics approval was obtained from the Ethics Board of Oxford University and POLE Institute, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Several interesting results were obtained, in particular: