Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been significantly impacted by the ongoing coronavirus outbreak and is forecast to fall sharply from 2.4% in 2019 to -2.1 to -5.1% in 2020, the first recession in the region over the past 25 years, according to the latest Africa’s Pulse, the World Bank’s twice-yearly economic update for the region.   Read more

This paper addresses the deeply gendered impact of COVID-19. The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to over a million confirmed cases, and tens of hundreds of deaths worldwide so far. As we see global responses to COVID-19, GAPS’s position is that a rights-based approach and gender- conflict analysis must be at the centre of any global response and recovery. This must assess not only the virus’s disproportionate impact on people, communities and countries based on their…

The global pandemic has hit small farmers with disruptions in health, food security, transport, finance and demand. It has also increased the cost of doing business. Smallholder farmers, already dealing with the effects of a climate and price crisis, are taking emergency measures for resilience. At the same time, they are preparing long-term strategies to regain competitiveness. This report relays the message of smallholder farmers on COVID-19 impact and recovery. It provides insights on what…

The current Covid-19 pandemic, like most of its kind, poses two closely interlinked challenges. They can be summarized as the demands for urgent actions needed to contain the outbreak; and the requirement to work on long-term strategic issues including investments directed towards social and economic recovery, and peace and security. The last part— peace and security that is intrinsically tangled with governance, the nature and the role of state, the popular and performance legitimacy and…

Sarah Dalrymple puts forward actions that humanitarian, development and peace actors can take to apply the nexus approach to the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and thereby help mitigate its impact. According to her, taking a nexus approach to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic is imperative for responding effectively to this crisis and protecting those who are most vulnerable. She provides three things that need to be done to put this approach into practice.   Read more

As the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading across the globe, its impact touches all corners of society. What happens when the pandemic reaches areas that were already dealing with various sorts of humanitarian challenges, and in what ways are humanitarian operations being impacted both directly and indirectly? In a time where the news are being flooded with information related to the pandemic and much of national authorities’ time and resources are being spent at mapping domestic…

As the impact of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic grows, local peacebuilders continue working to help communities break through cycles of violent conflict. During the first week of April, Peace Direct and Conducive Space for Peace held a series of consultations asking local peacebuilders how their lives and work have been affected by this unprecedented health emergency, what their communities need, and how they see their role during this time of crisis. These consultations included…

IHEID  has introduced a new series of think pieces to reflect critically on the limits (or untapped potential) of existing governance systems and innovative ways to solve future global challenges. This is one of them. The COVID-19 crisis has brought to light many realities about the contemporary global order, which was already far from stable. It demonstrates how quickly and deeply problems that originate in one part of the world can spread globally, highlighting the…

In this opinion peace, the director of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge and professor of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, Prof Alex Broadbent, argues that the biggest public health risk in Africa is not Covid-19, but the consequences of regional and global measures designed to reduce its effect on public health. The cost-benefit analysis of these measures yields a different result in Africa than in Europe, North America and large parts of…

In this article, the authors argue that for several reasons, conflict-affected environments are especially vulnerable to the outbreak of infectious diseases, are less likely to be able to identify and respond to outbreaks, and are less equipped to stop their spread within and beyond their often porous borders.   Read more