Funding the Fight against Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world causing great humanitarian loses and shattering economies, with many countries still scrambling to garner the needed resources to respond adequately to the pandemic and mitigate its impact on society. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the economic impacts of the pandemic will linger longer than expected. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called it an “unprecedented health and economic crisis” that would further exacerbate the region’s economic prospects now and in the future – and the humanitarian and social costs would be grave without an aggressive plan bailing out states.1 The World Bank also echoing the IMF’s prognosis, forecasted early on in the pandemic Sub-Saharan Africa experience of its first recession in 25 years, with economic growth declining from 2.4 percent in 2019 to -2.1 to -5.1 percent in 2020 and costing the region between US$37 billion and US$79 billion in output losses2.
Certainly, and as in most cases, the brunt of this recession would be borne by poor households, as many lose their jobs and extreme poverty rise unprecedentedly to about 27 million people, as reported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
Read full publication here.
