On the 8th of May 2021 the African Union (AU) and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) convened a high level emergency meeting of African ministers. The purpose of the meeting was to review and reflect on the impact that COVID-19 has had on Africa and evaluate the implementation of the Joint Continental Strategy to combat the virus.
From the start of its engagement in internal conflicts in the early 90’s, the Organization of
African Unity (OAU) focused on conflict prevention. This was based on the assumption that
prevention is better than a cure and that the United Nations (UN) was better equipped to deal
with costly peacekeeping operations.
Collective system leadership has enabled some countries to successfully manage the onslaught and debilitating consequences of COVID-19. This approach could also be usefully applied to situations where attempts to build and sustain peace have failed.
The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting negatively on the structure of governance around the world. As it shatters the lives and economies of many nations around the world, the virus has become a devastating and deadly behemoth of sort, collapsing systems and initiating more crises in our nations.
Tanzania’s COVID-19 strategy has been a mixed-bag of admission, denialism, pragmatism and tiptoeing. At the centre of this approach has been the country’s late President John Magufuli whose actions and statements defined the country’s COVID-19 policy.
The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic took us all by surprise and it interrupted the ‘normal’, rigidly structured operations of many institutions. The world as we knew it became a distant memory as we all scrambled to modify our systems of operation and adapt them to the new normal.
Pre-pandemic, much focus – rightly so – was given to education as a key tool for delivering Africa’s demographic dividend. Essentially, that if continental nations invested in their growing population of children and young people – particularly in their schooling and skills development – and adopted economic policies to create new jobs, Africa as a whole would see significant increases in per capita incomes. Fast-forward to April 2021 – one year into the COVID-19 crisis – and millions of children are not learning and are forgetting what they learned.
In recent years, there has been a new awareness of the need to hold states to account on their international law obligations to provide quality education for all children, and their duty to regulate private education. It is important not to let COVID-19 set us back on the momentum that was gathering around this issue. What makes it more difficult is that while COVID-19 scythed through government education budgets, and also led to the closure of many low fee private schools, it also created new opportunities for the private sector, particularly in the edu-tech sector.
COVID-19 has undoubtedly presented the biggest test of the resilience and relevance of Higher Education institutions in recent times. With the necessity for behavioural change to halt the spread of the virus, Higher Education institutions have been forced to think differently and contribute innovative responses to the pandemic.
It is now more than a year since the first COVID-19 case in the Central African Republic (CAR). Although the pandemic has spread at a slower rate and with less intensity than in many other countries, it has still had a significant impact on the country and its people. The December 2020 elections are one example of how COVID-19 is impacting every aspect of our lives, including our politics.