Since August 2020, Internews’ Rooted in Trust (RiT) project team – in partnership with our partners AMSODE and 12 local radio stations  – has collected, analyzed and responded to rumors about COVID-19 circulating among internally displaced communities in Mali.

This Information Ecosystem Assessment aims to establish an understanding of information dynamics in the context of IDP populations in four locations: Bamako, Ségou, Sikasso, Mopti and Tombouctou. It is based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with members of the Internally Displaced Populations (IDP) community living in camps, humanitarian organizations, state officials and professionals as well as quantitative data from a survey carried out in Bamako and Ségou.

The Information Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) is a study designed to understand the dynamics of transmission, production, and consumption of information in a given environment. Understanding the flow of information, its sources, channels, and the factors that affect it – intentionally or unintentionally– can help to empower citizens to make better-informed decisions, bridge divides, participate more fully in their communities, and hold power to account.

We hope that this report will prove useful for organisations working with these communities to better understand the dynamics of information, increase their efforts to listen and engage with communities and to support trusted information sources to provide quality information to support decision making during the pandemic and beyond.