ABSTRACT
According to the World Health Organization, COVID-19 is the fastest spreading and most contagious disease that has ever plagued humanity. Recently, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control officially announced through its website that the Delta variant as well as the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus are in Nigeria and have killed scores of people. Scholarly works on the novel COVID-19 have flooded the internet, especially to create awareness in the urban centres. The rural areas use traditional town criers on radio. Therefore, this paper focuses on the role and effectiveness of traditional town criers using the indigenous Yoruba language in creating awareness of COVID-19 on radio among the rural residents in Lagos who are mostly illiterate in English. Studies have shown that rural Africa has a long history of failing in its health campaigns where planners have not considered the basic elements underlying traditional communication systems such as the town crier in the dissemination of information. Technological determinism was the theoretical framework utilized in this study, and observation was used as a method for data collection. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Phillip Mpofu, Israel A. Fadipe, and Thulani Tshabangu;individual chapters, the contributors.