Optimizing Pandemic Preparedness and Response through Health Information Systems: Lessons Learned from Ebola to COVID-19

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Strengthening health systems and maintaining essential service delivery during health emergencies response is critical for early detection and diagnosis, prompt treatment, and effective control of pandemics, including the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Health information systems (HIS) developed during recent Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) provided opportunities to collect, analyze, and distribute data to inform both day-to-day and long-term policy decisions on outbreak preparedness. As COVID-19 continues to…

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What COVID-19 means for work, inequality, and politics

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The COVID-19 pandemic was a predictable outcome of accelerated globalization – plenty of people said it would come. But many governments paid little attention to the risks of accelerated viral transmission and have been caught on the hop, resulting in feeble policy responses and unnecessarily high levels of epidemic severity.  Vulnerability to pandemics is only one of the weaknesses in our old model of globalization. Others include soaring inequality and the failure to respond to…

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Beyond the Disease: Contextualized Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Children and Young People Living in Eastern and Southern Africa

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created extraordinary challenges and prompted remarkable social changes around the world. The effects of COVID-19 and the public health control measures that have been implemented to mitigate its impact are likely to be accompanied by a unique set of consequences for specific subpopulations living in low-income countries that have fragile health systems and pervasive social-structural vulnerabilities. This paper discusses the implications of COVID-19 and related public health interventions…

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Women’s mental health: acute impact of COVID-19 pandemic on domestic violence

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created a situation of general distress. Although the focus has been initially more on the physical health during the pandemic, mental health concerns linked to the lockdown have quickly risen. This study aims to assess the effect of the COVID-19-related lockdown on Tunisian women’s mental health and gender-based violence. An online survey was conducted, using the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS-21) and the Facebook Bergen Addiction Scale (FBAS)….

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Post-pandemic transformations: How and why COVID-19 requires us to rethink development

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COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited ‘big one’: a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 – as a health and development crisis – unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of…

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The Pandemic and the Transformation of Liberal International Order

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In 2018, 43 leading International Relations scholars in the United States signed a public statement in support of an urgent call to preserve the current international order, triggering heated scholarly debates. The idealized form of the liberal international order was criticized by many scholars for its chronic problems, including the contradictions between proclaimed liberal values and illiberal behaviors, the inability to reform its institutional pillars to accommodate the diverse group of emerging powers, and the…

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What Happened? How the Humanitarian Response to COVID-19 Failed to Protect Women and Girls

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As COVID-19 spread across the globe, gender-based violence (GBV) experts and women’s rights activists around the world raised the alarm that the pandemic and its ensuing movement restrictions would negatively impact the safety of women and girls. This was evidenced early on by concerning reports from feminist activists and GBV service providers in China, Italy, Spain, and Brazil, amongst others.i From the first week of March, the media regularly highlighted the increased risk of violence…

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The impact of COVID-19 on the Horn of Africa

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The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was first reported in the Horn of Africa region in early March 2020. At first, the number of cases seemed low compared to other regions, both on the continent and around the globe; however, these figures did increase steadily. Six months into the pandemic, it is encouraging to note the downward trend in the number of cases and deaths over the past few weeks. Thus far, more than 150,000 cases have…

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Are warnings of a COVID-19 famine in Africa overblown?

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Alarm bells have been ringing for months that COVID-19 could push fragile African countries “closer to the abyss” of famine as jobs are lost, local markets close, and poverty deepens. Aid agencies routinely list the coronavirus as a major factor in driving humanitarian needs, from the Sahel to Somalia, and don’t shy away from describing its impact as the “perfect storm”. A joint report in July by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food…

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Africa needs sustainable digitalisation: The link between tech, inequality and the environment

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What the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted in Africa is that addressing digital inequality isn’t a technology problem. It’s a classic development challenge. It’s become abundantly clear that offline education, gender, income, public service delivery and spatial inequalities are simply mirrored online. Meanwhile, structural economic deficiencies are arguably amplified, as the economic and social value of being digitally networked increases exponentially.   Read more

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