Most discussion of Africa’s response to COVID-19 takes place at the national level, focussing on the role of formal state authorities. However, less is known about the role of ‘public authorities’: traditional chiefs, self-help groups, kinship networks, professional associations, faith-based groups, civil society organisations, multinational companies, humanitarian agencies, organized criminal gangs, militias and rebels. These often operate below the national level and are particularly important in areas where the state is weak or absent.
To explore this gap, researchers at the Centre for Public Authority and International Development were asked to provide vignettes of life under, and public authorities’ responses to, the pandemic in the places they intimately know: northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone.