Strategies That Can Be Adopted to Ensure Ethical Communication Before, During and After Crises and Disasters in Zimbabwe

This chapter interrogates the strategies that can be adopted when communicating during an emergency or crisis as one of the most important elements of a disaster preparedness plan in Zimbabwe. The chapter is based on a qualitative desktop study where literature review was gathered from the Google scholar and African Digital Research Repositories in the form of articles, secondary government reports and newspapers. During an emergency, it is critical that those within the region know how to communicate effectively. This means managing communications not only to locals, but also to foreigners. When a disaster occurs, it is often the misleading bit of information shared by an outsider that gins up rumours. To start developing and executing a well-rounded communications strategy in Zimbabwe, a sound risk management should be conducted which includes, identifying the top threats and vulnerabilities to Zimbabwe; analysing the regions functions that are critical to its survival, identifying the resources needed to protect those critical regional functions, establishing a crisis management team, and designating certain people within that group to be responsible for communications.