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553COVID-19
and Africa: Does “One Size Fit All” in Public Health Intervention?
result has been to delay focus on a global approach to COVID-19. The
absence of concerted international solidarity to contain COVID-19 in
Africa will render the entire world vulnerable. However, several les-
sons and opportunities for Africa can be sketched from the current
realities and experiences.
First, reliance on external intervention will not optimally tap the
continent’s potential for resilience. African nations collectively need
to leverage their variegated capacities, and experiences with infec-
tious disease control, and to regionally scale the national response
successes in Senegal and elsewhere referenced above.
Second, a copy-and-paste adoption of emergency responses
crafted outside the continent will not effectively serve African reali-
ties. Adaptive approaches to emergency response measures, includ-
ing extra vigilance on matters of civil liberties and rule of law, are
important.
Third, COVID-19 demonstrates the core need for credible data
as a governance tool in order to identify and support vulnerable
demographics.
Fourth, pending improved governance over the use of data,
Africa’s endowment in community mobilization through religious
and cultural networks, including increasingly important diaspora
outreach, have demonstrable capacity to fill the gaps in government’s
failure to reach the most vulnerable.48 These actors need to be more
creatively integrated into African nations’ fledgling social safety nets
and protocols.49
Fifth, further growth in use of mobile money and mobile pay-
ment systems needs to be fostered, since electronic transactions do not
carry the virus-spreading risks posed by physical handling of cash.50
Sixth, despite the current weakening of global institutional pub-
lic health interventionist bodies and the tenuousness of international
comity, Africa needs to strengthen its own regional health bodies as
important pathways to scaling and dispersal of R&D efforts.
48. The African union recognizes the diaspora as Africa’s 6th regional category,
an evidence of the role and potential of that demographic in development. See
Carine K Nantulya & Dewa Mavhinga, “Africa’s Covid-19 Response Should
Focus on People’s Needs, Rights” (16 April 2020), online: Human Rights Watch
<https://bit.ly/2xHYU6S>.
49. See Gift Dafuleya “Explainer, Why COVID-19 Provides a Lesson for Africa
to Fund Social Assistance”, The Conversation (3 May 2020), online: <https://bit.
ly/2yrqLc6>.
50. See Gnassingbe, supra note 40.
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Titel
- VULNERABLE
- Untertitel
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Autoren
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Verlag
- Ottawa Press
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Abmessungen
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Seiten
- 648
- Kategorien
- Coronavirus
- International