Govender, Eliza Melissa.Mpungirehe, Odette.2025-11-172025-11-1720252025https://hdl.handle.net/10413/24099Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Globally, public health communication has taken an ongoing top-down approach. Community engagement is overlooked in emergencies, yet it is pivotal because it helps in recruiting new allies and resources, creating better communication, building trust, and improving overall health outcomes. COVID-19 preventive communication in Rwanda focused on disseminating information to the public, expecting them to adopt preventive behaviours. Development communication researchers have criticised the top-down approach as antagonising participation and engagement, thus advocating for a participatory communication model. The model follows a liberating communication philosophy in which participants cease to be filled but participate in the communication process, with dialogue and conscientisation as key drivers of that process. Unfortunately, how and when to start engaging communities is not clearly described in development communication literature. This study aimed to examine how dialogue and the stages of conscientisation in communities influenced COVID-19 prevention messages in Kigali, Rwanda. It examined how Kiruhura, Karama and Mwendo residents understand local contexts and how these influenced their communication of dominant messages. The study adopted the Participatory Communication Approach from Freire and Dutta’s Culture-Centred Approach, selected eighty-one participants through purposive sampling, collected data with nine focus group discussions, and utilised reflexive thematic analysis to illustrate the contextual perceptions, responses, and dialogical scenarios. It found that residents of Kiruhura, Karama and Mwendo communities perceived COVID-19 as illusory. Influenced by their culture, socioeconomic limitations and other pandemic experiences, communities perceived COVID-19 prevention messages as inapplicable, which resulted in mixed and ambivalent responses. Also, COVID-19 instructional communication humped dialogue and conscientisation by neglecting local contexts, which should constitute a practical foundation for the pandemic-related discussions, thus overlooking local communication structures. Therefore, this study suggests analysing communities' culture, experience with other pandemics, changing socioeconomic situation and their intersection with perceptions of emerging pandemics. It also advises introducing dialogue by linking pandemic narratives and community lived experiences, and basing community participation on local communication systems. In addition, this study suggests prioritising interpersonal over media channels. Scholarly, this research contributes insights on how to communicate contextually applicable pandemic preventive messages and apply the principles of humility, empathy, love, and hope in dialogically engaging Rwandan communities in pandemic communication. Practically, it discusses local enablers of pandemic dialogue.enCC0 1.0 Universalhttp://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/Health communication--Rwanda.Health communication--Messages.COVID-19--Conscientisation--Rwanda.COVID-19--Dialogue--Community engagement--Rwanda.Thesis