‘Ensemble On Sonne!’ Travels of KAP Studies (Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices) for the Prevention and Control of Covid-19 Infections in Upper Guinea

The Covid-19 pandemic drove a surge of preparedness and response interventions structured under international guidelines to be directly introduced in any local setting. This article analyses a Covid-19 readiness intervention, carried out by a partnership between the Robert Koch Institute–Berlin and a hospital in Guinea, West Africa. An ethnographic approach to the partnership’s sources and materials, in particular the Knowledge–Attitudes–Practices (KAP) Interventional study, draws attention to the ordinary and daily practices that allow for an outbreak response intervention to travel and be implemented locally. In order to unravel the partnership’s logics, I critically examine the documents used in the hospital during that programme: the guidelines and training leading the intervention as well as the data collection tools measuring its impact. I then turn to my ethnography at the hospital to provide an everyday emphasis to the KAP logics whose implementation I facilitated. Through this, I intend to reflect on the mechanisms that allow global health partnerships to travel and land in specific contexts, as well as to produce scientific evidence on hospital dynamics. I describe the routine of the partnership, the circulation of the materials it is based on, as well as the new materials it produces as it travels and lands, including the results from my own fieldwork. I argue that this traction to travel and to land is more based on expectations and scientific assumptions from the partnership’s stakeholders and beneficiaries at the hospital than on outbreak preparedness and daily dynamics of response.