With Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca all announcing this month that their vaccine candidates for COVID-19 are proving to be highly effective in clinical trials, the world is closer to finding a safe and effective vaccine to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the pandemic will not end with a vaccine, but when everyone, everywhere has equal access to it.
That’s why we launched our Vaccine Access Test in September. The Test provides the framework to answer one important question: Are the...
AfterShocks: Economics
Last week, G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors decided to extend the debt service suspension initiative (DSSI) until the end of June 2021, accepting that more must be done to help the world’s most vulnerable countries. They also agreed to a new initiative that would go further on debt relief – including by bringing private-sector creditors into the fold.
The World Bank also announced that it will consider providing more emergency COVID-19 relief, although, unfortunately, it would not suspend...
COVID-19 has presented many new social and economic challenges, and is exacerbating already existing ones. One such challenge is global poverty. Right now over 700 million people live in extreme poverty worldwide, which is defined as living on less than US$1.90 per person per day.
Right now, the pandemic is threatening to push up to 115 million people into poverty in 2020 alone. That would raise global totals significantly.
As we mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on...
The World Bank predicts the greatest drop in remittances in recent history, with low-income developing countries set to receive US$110 billion less, due to COVID-19 in 2020.
Remittances, which are the cash flows sent home by migrant workers to help their families, are a huge source of finance for low- and-middle-income countries. Last year, these countries received 78% of the US$714 billion that were sent around the world. Global remittance flows were five times higher than official development assistance in...
It has been more than three months since Isaac Mutua, a Kenyan working in Durban, South Africa, sent money home to his family back in Kenya. Mutua, a renowned chef, lost his job after his employer closed down the restaurant where he worked following the COVID-19 lockdown measures in South Africa starting on 24 March.
Since 2015, Mutua has been sending $300 monthly to Nduta, his wife based in Kitengela, outside of Nairobi. His remittances have been their sole source...