COVID-19 Conflict & Resilience Monitor – 21 October 2020

COVID-19 has created a global uncertainty: everyone everywhere is thinking about the possibilities of premature death. This uncertainty is upon all of us, but the African continent in particular, and the Global South in general, have been facing this uncertainty and this possibility of premature death for a very long time. Because of that, we will need to shift the geography of knowledge and even the biography of knowledge and begin to think about what is it that the Global South can offer us in dealing with this pandemic. What can we gain from indigenous African knowledges and epistemologies of the Global South? This argument arises because the Global South in general, and the African continent in particular, have some of the richest histories and experiences of dealing with epidemics and pandemics.

We watched in disbelief as COVID-19 emerged in China and ravaged parts of Europe and the Americas. Being a deeply religious country, we prayed and hoped that we would be insulated – after all, we were miraculously spared the 2014 Ebola crisis that hit a number of West African countries including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. Our hopes did not last beyond March 12, 2020, when our first two imported cases were reported. The third case recorded on March 14, 2020 was a University of Ghana student who had returned from a trip abroad. That hit home painfully, and we quickly had to act.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented disruption and uncertainty to universities in Africa. It forced the higher education sector in Africa to make changes that were long overdue by magnifying existing challenges to students’ ability to engage with their learning. COVID-19 has forced universities to recognize that the future is now. For years, many universities and governments have been talking about the need for online education or blended learning models in which at least part of a student’s education is captured online through a learning management system. However, many schools have been slow to respond to this call. COVID-19 has forced universities to either adapt quickly to an online delivery system or to stall and risk obsolescence.

Academic and research institutions find themselves tasked with learning how to adapt in real-time amid the COVID-19 pandemic that is significantly disrupting the global higher education sector. Most of the focus so far has been on western countries, leaving major gaps in our understanding of how Africa’s own centres of knowledge production are faring in this crisis. We know that the state of research and higher education on the continent has long been a cause for concern even before the COVID-19 crisis, and early indications show that the virus is exacerbating these vulnerabilities.