Many African countries, including Burkina Faso, Niger and Senegal, closed their international borders and areas around the big cities because of the global pandemic. This meant that our partners could not leave their own region or city for months. As frustrating as this was, our partners kept finding ways to keep the work going. In fact, this crisis pushed the whole consortium to think out of the box and to come up with creative ways to keep doing what needed to be done. The time and means we invested in connecting with locally-rooted, community based organisations and building a large network around them, turned out to be well spent: it enabled most partners to continue training activities, although with limited numbers, and outreach to communities, even with the imposed restrictions in place.