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...
Policy
The COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to undo years of progress on global education. Since the pandemic started, school closures have affected up to 91% of enrolled learners, or 1.6 billion children. Here is a look at how countries’ policies on school closures evolved over the past six months.
COVID-19 quickly transformed from a localized epidemic to a global pandemic with far-reaching consequences across sectors
6 months ago, when COVID-19 was still just a localized epidemic, only two countries had restrictions on...
In 2005 after the SARS epidemic, 196 countries signed on to the International Health Regulations (IHR). They laid out a set of goals to ensure countries were prepared to detect and respond to public health events.
But today, no country is fully compliant.
On average, low-income countries score lowest in their capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to outbreaks, according to the Global Health Security Index, which measures the health security and capabilities of countries that signed on to the IHR....
Fifteen years ago at the historic Gleneagles summit hosted by the UK, The ONE Campaign joined millions of campaigners to push G8 leaders to cancel 100% of the multilateral debt owed by the world’s poorest countries and double aid to Africa. Adding this to previous debt cancellation from Jubilee 2000, close to $100 billion of debt was written off for 36 heavily indebted countries.
After years of burdensome debt payments, incurred by undemocratic leaders, African governments had a clean slate...
Depending on how you look at it, data on the HIV/AIDS epidemic can tell two very different stories. On the one hand, the world has made huge progress against HIV/AIDS. For example, over two thirds of all people living with HIV are receiving treatment. On the other hand, there are still way too many people contracting HIV, and donor funding is the same as it was a decade ago.
No matter how you look at it, the story is far...
An Ebola epidemic has been growing in Africa since mid-2018. This outbreak follows the devastating Ebola epidemic that swept through West Africa between 2014 and 2016, resulting in more than 28,600 infections and 11,000 deaths.
The latest epidemic’s first case was reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in August 2018. Since then, more than 2,200 people have died. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the outbreak crossed national borders into Uganda in late June 2019,...
On 16 June, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the unexpected merger of The Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) into a new Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
This merger could be disastrous for those struggling to survive poverty, climate change, and the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than building a “global Britain,” it could see aid being spent on the UK’s trade, defence, and commercial interests. This would be putting politics before...
New OECD projects paint a grim picture for economic growth and recovery in the world’s biggest economies. The projections focus on two scenarios, one in which there is a second outbreak of COVID-19 infections before the end of 2020, with global lockdowns reinstated, and the other where a new wave is avoided.
But our Executive Director of Policy David McNair asked a different question: how will the aftershocks of COVID-19 affect the world’s poorest countries?
https://twitter.com/David_McNair/status/1271393245365522434
Government measures around the world have...
What policy measures have African governments taken so far during the COVID-19 pandemic? How many ventilators, hospital beds, and intensive care units do countries currently have? What have the economic shocks from COVID-19 meant for food security and remittances?
While the virus itself has been slower to impact Africa than other parts of the world, the drastic declines in global trade and travel — combined with measures like quarantines — are significantly impacting economies and well-being across the continent.
To better...
In just three months, COVID-19 has upended life in Africa. Around 70,000 people have been infected and over 2,000 have died.
Statistically, the African continent has been spared from the high concentration of cases seen elsewhere. Politically, in a world where there is a deficit on global leadership, we have seen the African Union step up to ensure a coordinated response across the continent, particularly in supporting countries with weak health systems and pushing for debt restructuring.
However, the reality remains...