In July 2021, Africa entered a third wave of COVID-19 after months of rising cases, hospitalization and deaths. In January 2022, Africa was hit by a fourth wave, after six continual weeks of surging numbers. The situation is likely to worsen given low vaccination rates. Many writers have pointed to causes like vaccine apartheid and the grabbing of health supplies by wealthy countries. Others have focused on the lack of health goods and service capacities in African countries, with terrible implications for their health and domestic economic conditions. Less has been written about how the historical patterns of financial flows have created these trends, how these flows had changed prior to COVID-19 and how the pandemic has affected debt levels and influenced the mix between aid, remittances, sovereign bond markets and other private flows and Chinese lending. A particular focus will be on how the West, through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, is attempting to use the crisis to re-empower its presence in Africa.
The Introduction to this book aims to contribute to social science and humanities research by investigating key issues and emerging concerns pertinent to the effects of COVID-19 on the Global South. The book is transdisciplinary and draws on perspectives from health, economics, geography, development practice, political science and other academic specialisms on themes relevant to international development, public and social policy. The Introduction highlights the need for this text at this point in time and notes that this is a vital dialogue on an important topic. The scale of the pandemic and the resultant socioeconomic scarring across the Global South needs to be examined from different perspectives to give those acting in the field a better, critical knowledge base to help mitigate its consequences in highly vulnerable regions. The central need for the book is to provide a specialist discourse from a generic international development studies perspective on how the impact of COVID-19 and its variants can be mitigated in some of the most challenging socioeconomic contexts on earth.
This chapter analyses the actions taken by political stakeholders – presidents, state powers, opposition, political and social actors – in the face of the COVID-19 health crises in 18 Latin American countries. To do so, we study the actors in charge of communicating the outbreak of the pandemic and analyse the type of discourse they used. Then we explain which institutions undertook leadership in the crisis, highlighting the relevance almost always acquired by presidents and the secondary role played by the legislative and judicial powers. Thirdly, we discuss the role played by other political and social actors. Finally, we note the impact that the COVID-19 health crisis has had on the region’s democracies, emanating from the dynamics of the concentration of power in the executive and based on the results of elections held since September 2020.
In May 2020, the President of Tanzania declared his country COVID-19 free as a result of its citizens’ three days of prayer, making the country an outlier in its response to the pandemic. This chapter examines how local communities and health facilities responded to the pandemic, balancing the need to avoid infections and keep communities safe with the need to avoid appearing to contest the official narrative. This account blends a case study, focusing on the paediatric cancer ward of one Tanzanian hospital, with literature that has emerged from, and about, Tanzania since the start of the pandemic. It highlights the benefits of locally produced personal protective equipment (PPE), which emerged as a readily available solution when global supplies ran critically low. Locally produced PPE was a cost-effective and locally acceptable solution. Nationwide, Tanzania recorded a significant number of high-profile deaths, including the death of President Magufuli in March 2021, suspected by some to be of COVID. While the leadership change heralded a change in policy direction, this chapter reveals that throughout the pandemic, Tanzanian citizens and local-level bureaucrats employed a range of locally available prevention measures. Their actions kept communities as safe as possible without publicly acknowledging that many were seriously affected by the pandemic.
With the advent of the global pandemic, the architecture of international development has changed. Limited advances made through the promotion of universal healthcare and attempts to reduce global equality have been put under strain in a manner not seen in a generation. The deviation from rights-based approaches to public and social policy since early in 2020 has continued throughout the various waves of the pandemic and has caused different regions to react in different ways to enforce lockdowns, protect pharmaceutical companies, enforce inequality and introduce sometimes draconian public health emergency laws. COVID-19 has also sometimes been used as a pretext to further erode equality legislation and human rights in different contexts around the world. This chapter assesses the implications of this pandemic inequality as a feature of international development in light of the actions taken by governments around the world over its first two years.
This collection reflects on key issues that have arisen globally going into a third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and explores their implications for international development. The emerging disparities and disparate responses on global and national scales mean that the implications of this pandemic will affect regions and societies in radically different ways. What has emerged to date has been further crises of disconnection and a pervasive health provision crisis that has exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and uneven development globally. Contributors focus on development implications, medical impacts, gender (in)equality dimensions, human rights breaches and the effects on migration, climate change and economic inequality, among other issues. Particular attention is paid to the accentuated risks faced by vulnerable populations and the differing impacts of policy interventions and governmental adaptation to the necessity of public protection.
This collection reflects on key issues that have arisen globally going into a third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and explores their implications for international development. The emerging disparities and disparate responses on global and national scales mean that the implications of this pandemic will affect regions and societies in radically different ways. What has emerged to date has been further crises of disconnection and a pervasive health provision crisis that has exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and uneven development globally. Contributors focus on development implications, medical impacts, gender (in)equality dimensions, human rights breaches and the effects on migration, climate change and economic inequality, among other issues. Particular attention is paid to the accentuated risks faced by vulnerable populations and the differing impacts of policy interventions and governmental adaptation to the necessity of public protection.
This collection reflects on key issues that have arisen globally going into a third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and explores their implications for international development. The emerging disparities and disparate responses on global and national scales mean that the implications of this pandemic will affect regions and societies in radically different ways. What has emerged to date has been further crises of disconnection and a pervasive health provision crisis that has exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and uneven development globally. Contributors focus on development implications, medical impacts, gender (in)equality dimensions, human rights breaches and the effects on migration, climate change and economic inequality, among other issues. Particular attention is paid to the accentuated risks faced by vulnerable populations and the differing impacts of policy interventions and governmental adaptation to the necessity of public protection.
The COVID-19 pandemic poses evolving dilemmas of disease, death, disability and economic and sociopolitical inequalities and injustices, as the virus continues to spread and variants evolve. This contribution reflects on the development of disinformational responses by reactionary populist political forces in Brazil, with serious implications for the Brazilian national health system – the Sistema Único de Saúde – and global public health. Strategic disinformation and misinformation have affected democratic systems globally, including the two largest democracies in the Global South. Disinformation, including official disinformation promoting scientifically unproven ‘early treatment’, has significantly impacted public discourse and health behaviours in the face of the pandemic. Sudden onset or ‘fast’ crises like the COVID-19 pandemic have roots in, and connections to, ‘slower’, connected crises of authoritarian, extractivist, necropolitical (the use of power to dictate how some people may live and some die) and even genocidal forms of ‘development’ that prioritize prevailing, inequitable and unsustainable economic arrangements at the expense of many people’s lives, health and prospects. Current trends of official disinformation negatively impact public health systems, personnel and capacities to prevent and minimize harm while deepening harmful, unequal and disequalizing effects. This contribution argues that development and global health ethics warrant urgent and direct attention to survival, countering democratic disinformation and necropolitics.
COVID-19, declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, spread geographically with great speed and a high rate of mortality, initially in high-income countries but more latterly followed by countries in the developing world. In response to the pandemic, many countries around the world instituted ‘lockdowns’ of various sorts to contain it. Globally, the policy responses to contain COVID-19 have been similar but were applied by individual countries with different levels of intensity in line with the evolution of the pandemic in the respective countries and other considerations. Data suggest that the lockdown measures put in place by governments have triggered global socioeconomic shocks as economies have gone into recession due to the disruption of economic activity that the lockdown measures have entailed. The COVID-19 state response in Zambia has been informed more by the country’s economic circumstances than global trends. With a majority of people eking out a livelihood in an informal economy and already under pressure, Zambia’s response to the pandemic was more measured against its economic circumstances. This chapter aims to analyse the COVID-19 policy response adopted by Zambia and how this served to protect the livelihoods of the majority of the people in the informal economy.
