Publications /
Opinion

Back
Resilience Against All Odds
March 8, 2021

Affluent citizens of Manhattan have been escaping to their beach homes at the famous Hamptons or the picturesque coast of nearby Massachusetts. Parisians are deserting their spacious apartments overlooking parks and boulevards, descending on quaint villages in Normandy or beyond. London has noted stagnation in the number of new renters and buyers, and Londoners with property in peaceful countryside are moving out of the city, ready to work from home. Futurologists, sociologists and city planners are noting a new trend, brought about by COVID-19: centers of major cities worldwide, which just a year ago were bustling with consumers and unending traffic, are thinning out, with companies deserting office buildings, possibly never to return.

In one part of the world, however—Africa—cities seem to have been spared. The flight to safety, to escape the death, depression, and disaster caused by the virus, has not happened. Paola Maniga and Yassine Moustanjidi, in a Policy Brief for the Policy Center for the New South (African Cities in Times of COVID-19: Resilience against all Odds) take an optimistic, preliminary, lesson from this. They advance the theory that the African fight against the pandemic has resulted in innovative approaches that perhaps could pave the road to a new urban development model in Africa and beyond.

COVID-19 has exposed new vulnerabilities in social infrastructure and governance systems, noted Paola Maniga and Yassine Moustanjidi. During the first months of the pandemic, the authors wrote, “there was a genuine concern” about the capacity of the Global South to contain the spread of the virus: “African cities were particularly vulnerable”, with some experts, including the head of the World Health Organization, “predicting a catastrophe for the continent”. But in fact African cities have been able to defy predictions of doom and tragedy, and have “avoided the exponential death and contamination rates observed in other parts of the world”, including major cities like London or New York. It seems almost a miracle how African cities have been able to master the menace, concluded Maniga and Moustanjidi. They argued that, while Africa’s low mortality rate from COVID-19 can be linked to demography, with 60% of the population aged under 25, the resilience in Africa against the virus is “also due to quick adaption and to the coping mechanisms in some African cities covering many social, spatial, and governance aspects”.

The Road to a New Urban Development Model

African governments have put in place, like nations worldwide, a series of measures to contain the spread of COVID-19, including lockdowns, curfews and banning of public gatherings, decisions the authors consider important, but argue that the “top down approach”, which overlooks the input of local communities and disempowers them from a domesticizing , indigenous, and home grown discourse. Engagement with local authorities is key if their voices are to be included in local, regional, and national responses to the pandemic, thus ensuring their own recovery, even more in some areas where tribal society remains prominent. The researchers wrote that “From preparedness and compliance with lockdowns, to building trust and confidence in the implementation of other upcoming emergency measures, a meaningful collaboration between community groups and informal actors on the one hand, and institutional governance on the other, has made the fight against COVID-19 more successful”. Maniga and Moustanjidi present examples of fruitful partnerships, as in Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian Community Radio Network partnered with UNESCO, the Ethiopian Ministry of Health, the United Nations Communication Group and Ethiotelecom to enable community radio journalists and volunteers to get real-time lifesaving information from the government and other COVID-19 response teams through a wider network: “By involving local community volunteers who better know their peers, and empowering them to be creative in producing programs to educate in several local languages, community radio played a major role in knowledge sharing and connectivity in remote areas, and in timely manner”.

The pandemic, noted the writers, has also revealed the increasing importance of digital technology as a key ingredient to effectively respond to the crisis. Although several African countries still struggle with the development of their digital economies, with only 28% of the African population able to access the internet, others have quickly embraced digital transformation programs and have applied technology advancement to the health sector and as a means to continue economic and social activities and shape sustainable recoveries from the pandemic. Certain African governments have encouraged mobile money use instead of cash for local transactions and payment for goods and services, to prevent the spread of infections. The Policy Brief includes examples of how the pandemic led to innovative partnerships between tech companies and entrepreneurs that aim to bridge the digital gap in Africa: “From Kenya to Cameroon, Ghana, Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia, several mobile network operators have increased daily limits, doubled internet speeds, waived fees on nominal transfers via mobile money, or offered governments the ability to send free text messages to people living in areas hit by COVID-19”.

For the authors “one country in particular” has accelerated its digital transformation during the pandemic—Morocco. The kingdom has “harnessed technology adoption across a wide range of economic sectors. From the proliferation of online banking services, to the distribution of financial aid, distance learning in schools and universities, teleworking in companies and telemedicine”. Morocco has been able to react swiftly and decisively to the threat of the coronavirus pandemic through the power of data and technology. Telemedicine has been encouraged, with the Ministry of Health offering a free telemedicine platform to allow remote medical care, thus relieving congestion in several hospitals. Maniga and Moustanjidi did not shy away from a critical, even sober assessment: “The pandemic has highlighted how urban planning, health and equity are intertwined. It has made clear to city managers that the social marginalization and the unequal distribution of public services will be counterproductive in managing current and future urban crises. The pandemic has been a wakeup call for many cities across the continent to rethink their planning models, and to assess the social, ecological, and economic vulnerabilities of their urban systems”.   

RELATED CONTENT

  • August 30, 2021
    There is not much of an argument: some countries in mighty Africa faced and mastered the COVID-19 invasion as efficiently, or even better, than any nation on the globe, including former colonial powers in Europe. By June 2021, 140,400 Africans had died, compared to more than 500,000 virus victims in Brazil, or 600,000 plus in the U.S. Some experts explain the result as a product of long experience from a multitude of previous health crises: Ebola, AIDS/HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. Ot ...
  • August 27, 2021
    Si le nombre absolu de cas d’infection à la COVID-19 est resté relativement faible en Afrique par rapport aux autres régions du monde, notamment l'Europe et l'Amérique du Nord, le virus n ...
  • Authors
    July 16, 2021
    The BDA Currents: Where Diplomacy Meets Business, is the Brussels Diplomatic Academy’s annual report covering the wider geopolitical and other factors influencing and affecting the world of diplomacy, international relations and global business. The journal focuses on issues of topical interest around the centers of global power, influence and importance, including the continents of Europe and Africa, the Middle East, China, India & Asia, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independe ...
  • June 04, 2021
    The COVID crisis has demonstrated that health can be described as both (geo)political and economic capital, thus emphasizing the role it can play in power struggles at different scales. A ...
  • May 20, 2021
    The fourth edition of the African Peace & Security Annual Conference (APSACO) was held on September 23-25, 2020 under the theme ‘COVID-19 & Security in Africa.’ The three-day event, organized by the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS), was composed of two panels and two workshops: - Panel 1: The Security Sector in Africa During and After the COVID-19 Health Crisis - Panel 2: The Privatization of Violence in Africa: Non-State Armed Groups and Private Security - Workshop ...
  • May 20, 2021
    The Policy Brief ‘Pandemic, Preparedness, Morocco, and Africa’ by Uri Dadush provoked a personal reaction: Morocco may never be crowned football’s world champions, alas, but which nation, besides China, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Denmark, Vietnam, organized its anti-COVID-19 offensive more digitally and in a more modern way than the Kingdom? Morocco’s bureaucracy is at times suffocating and unpleasant, its public hospital system stressed and underfunded. But today I can vouch for a ...
  • May 17, 2021
    It has been over a year since COVID-19 has wreaked havoc across the globe – causing a dramatic loss of human life worldwide, devastating economic and social disruptions, and putting half ...
  • Authors
    Asma Lamrabet
    May 15, 2021
    Il y a, désormais, un avant et un après Coronavirus dans le récit de l’histoire de l’humanité de ce XXIème siècle. L’épidémie du Coronavirus représente sans doute le point de rupture historique symbolique d’une nouvelle reconfiguration du monde. La crise sanitaire planétaire s’est imposée à nous et a brutalement chamboulé un mode de vie que l’on pensait éternel et presque invincible alors, qu’au fait, elle n’a fait que révéler ce qui longtemps était en état de latence : un monde dan ...
  • Authors
    Eugène Berg
    Pascal Chaigneau
    Jérémy Ghez
    May 3, 2021
    Les Dialogues Stratégiques, une collaboration entre HEC Center for Geopolitcs et Policy Center for the New South, représentent une plateforme d’analyse et d’échange biannuelle réunissant des experts, des praticiens, des décideurs politiques, ainsi que le monde universitaire et les médias au service d’une réflexion critique et approfondie sur les tendances politiques mondiales et les grandes questions d’importance commune pour l’Europe et l’Afrique. Cette publication est issue de la ...
  • April 28, 2021
    “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of history” (George Orwell) It was one of those years to forget. In 2020, three million citizens worldwide were killed by a devastating virus. How should we deal with COVID-19’s tragedies in the post-virus phase? Winston Churchill’s wisdom may help avoid another cataclysm: “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, he is supposed to have said. The source of the evil viru ...