Ethnic minorities from different contexts around the world have been particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Causes include structural health disparities and the risk of rapid spread, particularly in dispersed rural communities where multiple families share one household (Kirby, 2020). This situation gets critical considering the scarcity of state health institutions and the precarious or non-existent rural hospital infrastructure (Leonard, 2020).

This affects indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in Colombia who live in collective territories in the Pacific region, as well as other rural communities in the country. According to the 2018 census, there are six ethnic groups: Rom (> 1 per cent), Indigenous (4.4 per cent) and Afro-Colombians, negros, raizales and palenqueros (Afro-descendants: 9.34 per cent) (DANE [Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística: National Administrative Department of Statistics], 2018). Even though the Colombian constitution of 1991 declared the country as pluri-ethnic and multicultural, the country is far from removing all forms of racism and discrimination. Most of these communities live in hard-toreach rural areas, usually conflict-affected with the presence of multiple armed groups. As a result, these communities have suffered systemic discrimination and state abandonment, and are still experiencing violence from the internal armed conflict that has continued despite the signature of the Peace Agreement in 2016 (Castillo, 2016).

In this region, forcefully displaced people receive humanitarian assistance by government and non-governmental organizations. A specific case is the Humanitarian Assistance of Internally Displaced Population programme developed by the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) with the financial support of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration of the US Department of State. The programme aims to restore basic needs, develop a community protection mechanism and offer psychosocial support focused on resilience in the first months of the displacement emergency. Considering that almost 80 per cent of the beneficiaries are Afro-Colombian and Indigenous people, PADF is revising its psychosocial strategy´s intercultural approach. The aim of this chapter is to present the systematization of experiences of the implementation of the psychosocial strategy, as well as the challenges and learnings of conducting this kind of participatory study in the midst of a global public health emergency.