The global economy grew by 5.9 percent last year and in January the International Monetary Fund forecast 4.4 percent growth in 2022. Africa rebounded well in 2021 from its first recession in a quarter-century, with aggregate output increasing by 5.1 percent. The IMF predicts regional GDP growth of 3.9 percent in 2022.

In a sign of post-crisis normalization, tourism-dependent economies are likely to be Africa’s fastest growing in 2022. The island states of Cabo Verde, Mauritius, and the Seychelles are each expected to grow by more than six percent; the Seychelles forecasts Africa-leading 7.7 percent growth.

The resilience of these economies highlights the extent to which COVID-19 vaccine rollouts are powering the post-crisis recovery. About 81and 76 percent of the populations of the Seychelles and Mauritius, respectively, are now fully vaccinated, far above the African average of around 15 percent.

Many other factors supported Africa’s rebound in the post-containment phase of the pandemic. These include favorable commodity terms of trade, easing global financial conditions, and strengthening global demand boosted by vigorous growth in the European Union, China, India, and the United States – the markets for more than 55 percent of Africa’s exports.

Several African frontier economies returned to international capital markets in 2021 and issued sovereign bonds worth more than USD 19.6 billion. Most of these issues were oversubscribed, reflecting global investors’ increasing confidence in the continent’s growth prospects.

But despite the synchronized global recovery, per capita income growth in most countries is not expected to return to its pre-pandemic trend before 2023. Worse, the balance of global risks to current baseline forecasts is tilted to the downside – with potentially damaging consequences for Africa.

For starters, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has caused oil and food prices to spike further, creating strong headwinds for African countries that are large net importers of these commodities.

The Russian invasion, and the sweeping Western-led sanctions it triggered, will therefore likely exacerbate the inflationary pressures arising from pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions and persistent supply-demand imbalances. It will also push more people into poverty and raise income inequality, because food-price inflation tends to hit low-income households harder.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 vaccine inequity and the hoarding of doses by rich countries are perpetuating the pandemic and allowing new variants of the virus to emerge, especially in poorer countries with low vaccination rates.

Although Omicron seems to be causing lower rates of hospitalization and death than earlier variants, governments are still responding to its arrival by reactivating precautionary containment measures as the lockdown in Shanghai illustrates. This has contributed to inflationary pressures – especially in the US, where a tight labor market has sustained buoyant nominal wage growth.

Policymakers must urgently address the problem of beggar-thy-neighbor pandemic strategies, and act swiftly to enhance global cooperation and encourage geographical diversification of vaccine production and output of other lifesaving medical supplies.

But today’s growing risks to economic growth require governments to bolster international cooperation even further. In particular, ending the US-China trade war would reduce the impact of tariffs on trade costs and further alleviate inflationary pressures, which have received a major boost from the Ukraine crisis.

Anticipated sharp interest-rate increases by major central banks in response to rising inflation constitute another major downside risk.

For African countries, this is magnified by onerous “perception premiums,” which have long undermined macroeconomic stability and impeded growth on the continent. These premiums reflect the perennially overinflated risks assigned to Africa, irrespective of global economic conditions, the continent’s improving macroeconomic fundamentals, or individual countries’ growth prospects.

The resulting increase in funding costs and constrained access to capital could thus undermine the fragile recovery in a region with limited fiscal space for public investment.

Aggressive interest-rate hikes, in addition to central banks’ turbocharged tapering of bond-buying programs, could lead to a sharp deterioration in global investor sentiment and trigger massive capital outflows from Africa. The resulting currency depreciations would raise external debt-service costs, further strain public finances, and fuel inflation.

Sovereign-debt distress would then emerge as a real and present danger. In the most vulnerable countries, the expiration of temporary relief measures such as the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative would necessitate allocating further scarce resources to service external debt in an environment of rising interest rates and eurobond yields.

Weaker growth in Africa’s main trading partners also could jeopardize the region’s economic outlook. Africa’s growth forecast hinges largely on China, which has been the rising tide lifting all African commodity-exporting boats and where easier financing conditions and fiscal stimulus will sustain investment and drive global demand.

But with heightening geopolitical tensions disrupting trade and worsening supply-chain bottlenecks, the recovery in China and other leading economies may moderate more than expected, undermining African growth.

Finally, rising security challenges are jeopardizing Africa’s economic prospects. Military spending has become one of the fastest-growing items in government budgets across the continent. Further increases in a context of sharpening geopolitical tensions and return of a cold war could exacerbate fiscal deficits and reduce the ability of more vulnerable governments to respond to crises.

A worsening security environment will deter private capital and divert resources away from productive investments, including in infrastructure. Sustaining the growth of these investments is critical if Africa is to capitalize on the competitiveness and productivity gains that the new African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) should deliver.

The AfCFTA’s launch last year was an important milestone on the path toward diversifying Africa’s sources of growth and trade. Ultimately, the agreement will enable Africa to benefit from the accelerated reordering of global supply chains, so that its economies become more resilient to future global shocks.

But, as systemically important central banks pivot toward inflation-fighting mode, the most immediate imperative is to pursue price stability without derailing the incipient global recovery, which has been caught in the crossfire in Ukraine. Achieving the right balance is perhaps even more important for developing countries in Africa and elsewhere.

(Hippolyte Fofack is Chief Economist and Director of Research at the African Export-Import Bank.)

Contributed by Hippolyte Fofack

A disease becomes an outbreak when it covers a small geographic area. If it widens in terms of time, place and increased number of cases, it becomes an epidemic. The duration of its occurrence could also be short or long. When it is short with a constant number of cases across time in a geographically confined area, we can then refer to it as an endemic. An endemic disease of different geographic area differs accordingly. The shift is from a single case of a disease into an outbreak, into an epidemic and then into an endemic.

A pandemic refers to a disease that attacks multiple countries, becoming a new and major global public health threat. It has a huge multi-dimensional impact by challenging the health policies, programs, healthcare workers and lifesaving services, overwhelming the healthcare system in general. Budget is diverted to prevention and control to abate the spread of the pandemic, constraining the whole healthcare system.

Due to the nature of the virus and the need to control its spread had meant that measures restricting movement and regulations, curtailing businesses operations had to come into play. Governments, including Ethiopia, instituted nationwide partial or full lockdowns with personal protective equipment’s becoming mandatory.

Even though implementing these measures is difficult, most people became accustomed to wearing masks and sanitizing frequently which has turned into a habit. So how can these measures be lifted and return to some semblance of normality?

According to experts, lifting the measures is not as straight forward as it seems. Hospital admission and death rate, vaccination coverage and effective use of PPEs, and other preventive measures, must be given due considerations.

In the past couple of months, the number of cases, transmission rate, fatality and re-infection were considerably reducing. The estimated death toll by experts from available data in Ethiopia was around 56,100. And, until March, 18, 2022, the number of COVID-19 related deaths was far lower compared to other countries.

In the past three months, the number of cases globally, the prevalence of new infections and death has lowered significantly. If we take Omicrons rate of transmission, according to the Lancet, its transmission rate is faster than the use of PPEs. Its surge will also increase the coverage of vaccinations and “herd immunity” will be acquired and this lowers the level of viral transmission.

Nevertheless, the number of asymptomatic carriers is escalating whereas re-infection is low. In a South African study, about 85.3 percent of the cases were asymptomatic.

Immunity against COVID-19 is acquired in two ways. This is from a previous infection or vaccination. While vaccination coverage remains low, the effective and regular use of PPEs reduces the chance of further transmissions. However, the constant use of PPEs for the past two years may result in unexpected health complications.

According to the February 2022 Lancet Commentary, “After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.” So lifting the measures and going back to normality must be the next step. Vaccination coverage must be ramped up and vulnerable groups must be protected to open up the economy fully and lift COVID-19 measures. 

Ethiopia faces multiple challenges posed by the conflict in northern Ethiopia and the slowdown of the economy exacerbated by COVID-19, drought and the war in Ukraine. According to my observations, in Addis Ababa, about seven out of ten people do not wear masks. This shows the lack of care in society. And for the regulations to be lifted, it is dependent on the will of the people.

Contributed by Bedilu Abebe

This raises questions about how much digital consumption increased, whether the crisis widened the digital divide or spurred economies with little e-commerce to catch up, how permanent the shift to online sales will be, and what factors explain deviations between economies and sectors.

We investigated these questions in a new research that uses a unique database of aggregated and anonymized transactions through the Mastercard network from across 47 countries from January 2018 to September 2021. We found that the share of online spending rose more in economies where e-commerce already played a large role—and that the increase is reversing as the pandemic recedes.

This research, a new partnership between Mastercard, the International Monetary Fund and Harvard Business School, shows how private-sector data can help advance empirical economics and will be the first in a series of such studies.

Variation across economies

On average, the online share of total spending rose sharply from 10.3 percent in 2019 to 14.9 percent at the peak of the pandemic, but then fell to 12.2 percent in 2021.

Though the latest online share of spending is higher than before the pandemic started, it’s only 0.6 percentage points above the growth trend for e-commerce had the crisis not happened. While most economies are now below those peak levels, there are still significant differences among countries.

The online share of spending is still above pre-pandemic trends in about half of economies, from large emerging economies such as Brazil and India to other middle-income countries like Bahrain and Jamaica.

In all the others, including the United States and many advanced economies, the online shares are now either at or below the predicted pre-COVID trend levels. Those trends are estimated in each economy using a simple extrapolation of e-commerce’s path before the pandemic and reflect what would have been predicted in the absence of the crisis.

We find that e-commerce increased more in economies with a higher pre-COVID share of online transactions in total consumption, exacerbating the digital divide across economies. For example, Singapore, Canada and the United Kingdom had high shares to begin with, and their online penetration went up even more during the pandemic. On the other hand, countries like Brazil and Thailand had low online shares pre-COVID, and they experienced less acceleration.

How persistent was the effect on online sales? Strikingly, the latest data suggest that the spikes in online spending shares are gradually dissipating at the aggregate level.

The average online spending share at the peak of the crisis was 4.3 percentage points above the level that would have been predicted before it hit. This difference drops to only 0.3 point by the end of our sample period.

Pandemic restrictions, fiscal support

One explanation for the variation across economies, and in online share of spending, may be the difference across pandemic-related mobility restrictions. Not surprisingly, economies with stricter limits saw much higher online spending.

This was particularly true at the beginning of the crisis in the second quarter of 2020, when lockdowns severely curbed movement in most economies. However, as the pandemic continued; that correlation between restrictions and online spending weakened—consistent with the declining impact of lockdowns and other restrictions on economic activity over time.

In addition, fiscal support during the pandemic helped boost e-commerce penetration, likely by increasing consumption, which, in the presence of pandemic restrictions, could mostly be done online. Wealthier, more digitally mature economies also returned faster to pre-pandemic pace of online spending once the crisis receded.

Longer-lasting effects

One common narrative is that the pandemic accelerated digitalization, forcing consumers to learn how to shop online, and that this learning was here to stay. While our results support the quick uptake of e-commerce, the persistence of learning does not appear broad-based.

That said we find significant variation by industry. The embrace of e-commerce appears to be particularly longer lasting in restaurants (more specifically in food delivery), health care (which includes telemedicine) and some categories of retail, including department stores, electronics, and clothing.

During the initial surge of the pandemic, there was a big demand for e-commerce relative to in-person commerce. Economies and sectors already familiar with some of the technologies were able to go online to a larger degree. While the pandemic forced consumers to learn quickly, our results suggest that early adopters further extended the use of e-commerce within their economies.

Further, there are two possible explanations for differences in the embrace of e-commerce across industries. First, this could reflect that mobility hasn’t fully recovered, along with the in-person nature of some sectors such as dining. Second, digitalization in these same sectors wasn’t particularly high before the pandemic, and those were the areas where COVID-19 propelled the shift the most.

The share of online spending rose and fell most dramatically in those economies and sectors where e-commerce was already thriving before the pandemic. Industries with lower levels of digital maturity—including retail, restaurants, and health care—have greater potential for e-commerce, particularly in less developed markets, making them potentially ripe for change.

Contributed by Joel Alcedo, Alberto Cavallo, Bricklin Dwyer, Prachi Mishra, and Antonio Spilimbergo

A respirator disease that is highly contagious and has non-fatal and fatal complications swept through the world in 2020 and still does to this day. In fact, almost all pandemics are transmitted by respiratory droplets/airway/. The causative agent for the newly emerging cases is caused by a single-strand, positive-sense ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus, with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus.

Within almost a week, the pathogen was identified as a novel enveloped RNA betacoronavirus2, renamed severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), which has a phylogenetic similarity to SARS-CoV.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a public health emergency of international concern. Disease of interest and disease of concern differs in this case. The clinical manifestations included asymptomatic to symptomatic cases with symptoms including high grade fever, cough, shortness of breath, headache, malaise, fatigue and other constitutional symptoms.

Globally, as of 9:47 AM, March 4, 2022, there have been 442,084,034 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,981,137 deaths, as per Johns Hopkins tracker data. A total of 10,551,509,923 vaccine doses have also been administered.

The future of the world, to some extent, has changed forever in many ways and Human life before and after the pandemic will not be the same.

People relentlessly acted on identifying and managing the emerging pandemic, with, case notification and surveillance, researching means of transmissions, symptoms and complications as well as clinical strides were shared within the scientific community, across the globe. The mainstream media’s coverage of the emerging threat was 24 hours. The WHO, CDC, regional CDC’s and Health Ministers strived to minimize the spread of the disease.

Globalization had fostered the transmission and broadcast of news from all angles. Within two weeks of the pandemic, scientists discovered the gene sequence of the virus and the WHO identified the case, nomenclated the disease and developed a roadmap, urging scientists and health officials to engage strongly to halt the pandemic from spreading further.

Conspiracy theories had reemerged and were thrusted into the limelight for the public to debate. The west-east rivalry took on another shape and rivals had begun to compete for the future of the world, and assert dominance. Business allies, entrepreneurs and companies went into this pandemic shoulder to shoulder, competing to produce and provide personal protective equipment’s and avail drugs to COVID -19 ill patients. Now, it has extended to cover the vaccine economy, technology, marketing, vaccine equity and distribution and its misperception.

Until recent days, four types of variants of the virus and four waves of the pandemic had passed. We have lost our families, colleagues and professionals, including the ophthalmologist who first identified the disease in Wuhan Hospital: Dr Lee.

We have learned a lot since then. The first being how we communicate and how we react. We have learnt how to confront, challenge and solve problems. Global collaboration, communication and data sharing became the cornerstones to fighting the pandemic.

There are clearly unanswered questions. Is the disease biologically derived? Is it a result of global competition? Is it ‘biological weapon?  Are the conspiracy theories true?

One thing is true though; the virus exists and has killed millions. Millions have been infected. More than eight in ten were asymptomatic and less than one in ten had manifested moderate to severe forms of the diseases. We owe China and Italy a lot of gratitude for sharing with us their data about COVID-19.

Countries declared sweeping restriction of movement, quarantines and lockdowns. Wearing PPEs become mandatory. Ethiopia is not an exception. The first index case of COVID-19 [first case notified to the public] was reported in Ethiopia in March 13, 2020.

I personally felt caught between hope and despair, and trust and mistrust. We had had get-togethers with friends, conversed with families and colleagues, and everyone was frustrated. We even discussed possible scenarios, and searched for the dos and don’ts regarding the virus, but established facts were rare, it being novel and all. We speculated on possible outcomes. I personally had shared a lot.

 (Bedilu Abebe can be reached at bediluab@gmail.com)

Contributed by Bedilu Abebe

Outstandingly, the pandemic has made it abundantly clear that a global public health crisis cannot be solved in piecemeal; it requires genuine partnerships and cooperation. Therefore, the idea that to date the relationship between the EU and AU in responding to COVID-19 which can only be described as perfunctory charity should not stand on the way of real cooperation.

Africa and the world stand a better chance finding a way out of the pandemic if both the EU and the AU work together as equals, which makes it critical to instill this principle as the motto of the summit. There are no viable alternatives to this approach, especially at this time when developing countries have been victimized by decisions of wealthy countries to hoard vaccines or send nearly expired doses to Africa, paving the way for the cycle of deadly waves and variants to continue for a long time.

The Vaccinate Our World campaign (VOW), initiated by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), has for some time now since the beginning of the pandemic committed to address the immoral disparity in COVID-19 vaccine access between wealthy nations and those of lower economic status.

To date, 10 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered globally, with 80 percent of those going to people in high and upper-middle-income countries. Less than 16 percent of the 1.3 billion people on the African continent have received at least one dose.

Specifically, to address the glaring disparity in vaccine availability between Africa and Europe, leaders of both regions must commit to support the TRIPS waiver on vaccine patents and technologies at the World Trade Organization, make vaccines readily available and have a sufficiently long shelf life to avoid unnecessary wastage, expand local generic vaccine manufacturing, technological capacity and scientific know-how, end pandemic profiteering by pharma companies, fund the vaccine distribution infrastructure and human resources, maintain a transparent dialogue between EU and AU leaders and engage civil societies in the cooperation process.

These actions are urgent and necessary. The worlds’ inability to respond collectively to the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark indication that we need to urgently reform and strengthen the international framework of public health governance. To this end, we urge the leaders of the EU and AU to support the adoption of a new Global Public Health Convention or treaty.

Until the principles of equity, cooperation, transparency, and accountability are enshrined in an international accord, the risk of another, perhaps deadlier pandemic looms over all of us. Esteemed EU and AU leaders, the eyes of the world are upon you – now you must act!

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)

Globally, AHF works in 45 countries and provides care and services to over 1.6 million patients around the world.

The Betking Ethiopian Premier League (EPL) is set to resume this weekend after Ethiopia’s run in the African Cup of Nations came to an end. Following the Walias participation in the AFCON, the EPL was postponed for 35 days.

However, after the Walias dropped-out of the group stages, the local rivalries are set to resume in Dire Dawa City.

In the 2021/22 EPL season, the first nine weeks of matches were played in Hawassa University stadium. As per the EPL share company’s statement, the second round of matches were planned to take place at Adama University. However, the share company’s stadium inspection team stated that the host city did not fulfill the requirements to host the matches.

Due to this, Dire Dawa will now host the upcoming fixtures scheduled from week 10 to week 15. DSTV, which owns the rights to broadcast the matches, has already arrived in Dire Dawa.

Dire Dawa City Youth and Sport Commission, in collaboration with the city’s security force, has welcomed participating teams. In Hawassa, the fixtures usually kicked-off at 9:00 and 12:00 o’clock local time, but have now been changed due to the weather in Dire Dawa city.

The league company was in discussions with DSTV over the possibility of the games starting at 10:00 and 1:00 o’clock local time.

Some participating clubs have already arrived to commence their preparations, with Jimma City, Fasil Kenema, Hadiya Hossana, and Sebeta City among the first teams to arrive in the city.

Players who had a chance to take part in the AFCON have joined up with their clubs after returning from Cameroon.

However, there are complaints raised by participating clubs that COVID-19 protocols are being breached. During the Ethiopian Football Federation’s (EFF) general assembly, which was held a couple of weeks ago in Arba Minch, participating clubs raised the issue of players’ COVID-19 tests becoming a problem.

According to a complaint made by a club representative, players’ COVID-19 test results are being changed from a positive to a negative by bribing health officers.

Club representatives further elaborated that, there was a moment when more than five players tested positive in a single club. However, they preferred to change the result by bribing the health officers instead of being quarantined.

Meanwhile, as per sources The Reporter talked to, players who tested positive were not aware of their test results during quarantines and usually shared a room together.

Many argue that such carelessness has an impact on the league, players, clubs, and the competition itself.  The share company said that participating clubs should follow public health guidance to keep each other safe during match days.

The league company discussed with 16 participating clubs to confirm new COVID guidance rules. The share company had stipulated that clubs must conduct a COVID-19 test at a common center. Sidama Coffee football club was fined 25,000 birr following testing at other places at its own expense.

There are a variety of reasons why this happened: partly because women are concentrated in sectors that suffered a greater drop in demand during the pandemic, and also because existing gender gaps affected their ability to adapt. For example, women-owned businesses often had trouble accessing digital services needed to take their businesses online.

These factors may pile on top of a simpler and more jarring explanation of why more women-owned businesses regularly fare worse than men-owned ones: discrimination. It appears from our research that customers are less likely to buy from women-owned businesses simply because they are owned by women.

In a new paper on gender gaps in business profits in Indonesia, my coauthors and I looked at pre-pandemic data on a random sample of 4,828 men and women business owners (2,852 females and 1,976 males) from 401 mainly rural villages in five regencies (kabupaten) of East Java province, Indonesia.

Women-owned businesses are an especially important part of Indonesia’s economy, where businesswomen account for over half of the country’s micro- and small- and medium-sized enterprises and the sector contributes 43 percent of gross national product.

Here’s what we found

In our random sample of Indonesian businesswomen and businessmen, there were some similarities, but mostly large differences. The similarities we observed included years of business experience and similar scores in a cognitive ability index (scored 0-4).

There were large differences in the types of business and business outcomes. Proportionately more women business owners operate “consumer facing” restaurants and retail shops (which have been hard hit by the pandemic), while proportionately more men business owners operate other (unspecified) types of businesses, as well as service and processing businesses. In terms of business outcomes, men have more than twice as much capital, savings, and income from their business ventures. Importantly, women save more than men, but their lower incomes result in lower savings.

Even when men and women are matched in terms of characteristics of the owner and the resources of the business, including size and type, these vast gaps in outcomes persist. In fact, 40 percent of gaps in total earned income favoring men remain unexplained after this matching. Absent discrimination, these gaps should disappear using this methodology. Digging deeper, we found that discrimination by customers and women’s greater and more inflexible time spent at work contribute to these unequal business outcomes.

How we did it

In our methodology, we assumed that business owners’ observed (measured) characteristics and resources interact with unobserved (unmeasured) individual, household, and community level characteristics (like ambition, traditional gender norms, and discrimination) to produce business outcomes. Any residual gender gaps that remain after adjusting for differences in business owners’ observed characteristics and resources are attributed to the unobserved factors.

Using a technique called propensity score matching, our study paired women and men on demographic features, education, cognitive ability and risk taking, business experience, business capital and household assets, among other factors, and found that 40 percent of gaps in total earned income favoring men business owners remained unexplained after women and men were well matched.

Further, while the study found that some gender differences shrunk or disappeared after matching businesspeople, such as a difference favoring men on good business practices, it also found that other differences grew even larger. Particularly, women business owners have 25 percent fewer customers overall, and this difference grows significantly (by 143 percent) after adjusting for the additional endowments of men business owners, suggesting that gender discrimination by customers is at play. In addition, matching does not erase the gender differences in how much time owners spend at their businesses, with women reporting working more hours at the business in a typical day on average (8.6 hours versus 7.6 hours per day reported by men). Matching does not significantly reduce these hours.

Here’s what we can do about it

As countries across the globe, including Indonesia, are attempting to use their COVID-19 recovery policy agendas to address long-standing gender inequalities, they can’t ignore gender discrimination affecting businesses owned by women.

First, countries must strengthen micro and small businesses and ensure that economic recovery programs address factors in the family and community that tilt business environments in favor of men. If they don’t do this, a vicious cycle will continue, in which women’s low earnings lead to a cycle of low savings, which leads to limited capital formation and risk-taking, and to even lower earnings.

Second, countries must try to break this vicious cycle by strengthening businesswomen’s access to business capital, bank accounts, and savings as part of COVID-19 relief and small business recovery programs.

Third, financial service providers, including banks, cooperatives, mobile money operators and fintechs (financial service providers who provide online technology), need to serve women clients and eliminate possible biases against women in service provision. This change requires the commitment of financial regulators and collaboration with private sector providers and gender champions in the financial sector. The government and the private sector should provide incentives to financial sector providers to target the women’s market, and good gender data to design financial and insurance products that help overcome the constraints women face in the financial and business environments and to monitor their usage.

And finally, countries must tailor recovery policies to specifically address businesswomen’s needs, including addressing their unpaid care burdens. To address gender gaps in businesses, governments must also expand access to reliable, affordable, and quality childcare and eldercare arrangements for the self-employed.

Mayra Buvinic is an internationally recognized expert on gender and social development,

Contributed by Mayra Buvinic

It hasn’t, and closing borders won’t work when the next frightening variant emerges. Global injustice, it turns out, is very bad for public health.

Although more than half the world’s population has now been vaccinated against COVID-19, only 8% of people living in lower-income countries have received a vaccine dose, compared to 48% in lower-middle-income countries and much higher rates in high-income countries. As of November, the United States had administered more than twice as many doses than had been given in all of Africa.

Given these numbers, it is no surprise that variants of concern continue to emerge and spread rapidly in countries with low vaccination rates. And the disparity is not an accident. It is a direct result of nationalist policies and vaccine hoarding by wealthy countries.

Even before vaccines became available, many experts, including Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned about the consequences of vaccine nationalism. Despite this, wealthy countries have monopolized vaccine supplies, in some instances purchasing enough doses to inoculate their populations nine times over.

This summer, it seemed like the tide was turning. In June, members of the G7 pledged to donate their excess doses to low- and lower-middle-income countries either directly or through mechanisms like the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility. As more and more people in wealthy countries were vaccinated, there was some hope that vaccine nationalism and hoarding might end and that doses might finally make their way to countries desperately in need of them.

But in the past few months it has become clear that vaccine nationalism hasn’t ended. Instead, it has mutated.

Wealthy countries like the US began pushing to administer additional doses of some vaccines even before there was evidence to support the use of booster shots. In fact, shortly before the WHO called for a moratorium on boosters until vaccines had reached those who need them most, the US signed a deal to purchase 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for use as boosters. At the time, the use of third shots as boosters was not even approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

But booster shots in developed countries are not the only reason low- and middle-income countries lack doses. Canada, Spain, and Germany, among others, pledged months ago to donate millions of COVID-19 vaccines directly to low- and middle-income countries as well as to COVAX. Yet recent figures show that many governments have failed to deliver on these commitments. For example, the United Kingdom pledged to donate over 70 million doses, but has delivered less than 7% of this commitment.

Pharmaceutical companies and wealthy governments have been quick to blame low vaccine uptake in poor countries on vaccine hesitancy and underdeveloped health-care delivery systems. In a COVID-19 media briefing hosted by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that the level of vaccine hesitancy in Sub-Saharan Africa is “way, way higher than the percentage of hesitancy in Europe or in the US or Japan.” This is despite evidence that vaccine hesitancy is lower in Africa than in many wealthy countries.

Bourla’s effort to deflect blame for low vaccine coverage was an attempt to justify Pfizer’s profiteering. From the outset, the company has prioritized profitable deals with wealthy countries over sharing its vaccine technology with African producers.

AstraZeneca, one of the few pharmaceutical companies that made arrangements for equitable access to its vaccine through a licensing arrangement with the Serum Institute of India, recently announced that it would begin increasing the price of doses with the goal of making a profit. This decision reflects the worryingly misguided perception that the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

Wealthy countries also have been promoting a narrative that African governments lack the infrastructure and capacity to administer the doses that they have secured. But this criticism ignores the conditions under which doses have arrived. Donations often have shown up without advance notice, many close to expiration. With no information about the type, quantity, and condition of the arriving vaccines, health officials are unable to make preparations to deliver them in time. It is worth noting that, despite these challenges, African countries have been able to administer 62% of the doses they have received.

This scapegoating obscures the reality that low vaccine uptake in Africa is a direct result of wealthy countries’ vaccine hoarding and nationalist policies. And efforts to rectify this inequity have been blocked by the same governments that have an excess of vaccines. For example, a waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines is a crucial mechanism to increase their availability. But while South Africa and India applied for the waiver from the World Trade Organization more than a year ago, the application has been blocked repeatedly by countries like France, Germany, Spain, and Canada.

It is clear that disparities in vaccine access are not an accident of fate, but a result of concerted efforts by wealthy countries to keep vaccine supplies within their own borders and by pharmaceutical companies to increase their profits. It is time for rich-country governments and the pharmaceutical companies whose interests they serve to share vaccine doses equitably. Until everyone has access to a COVID-19 vaccine, no one is safe.

Editor’s Note: Safura Abdool Karim, a public health lawyer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is a member of the Africa CDC’s African Vaccine Delivery Alliance and Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of The Reporter.

Contributed by Safura Abdool Karim

The first challenge is that people’s relationship to work has changed. In some countries, lockdowns, the death of loved ones, and the general uncertainty of the pandemic have prompted or accelerated a rethink. In the United States, the number of workers quitting their jobs exceeded four million in each month from July to October 2021. Many young Chinese are joining the “lie flat” movement by opting out of long working hours, doing the bare minimum to get by, and striving for only what is absolutely essential for survival. The pandemic has deepened the divide between those who can work from home and the many who cannot.

In 2022, people need to trust that going back to work will genuinely improve their lives. Getting to that point will require action by both governments and companies. Investment to help remedy the disruption in education caused by COVID-19 is crucial. Some 1.6 billion students in 180 countries were kept out of school as a result of the pandemic. Establishing programs to help students catch up – and gain the skills and training needed for the twenty-first-century economy – will help them get better jobs.

Governments cannot do this alone, but they can at least set standards for education and training. They also can create or strengthen firms’ incentives to invest in their workforce by requiring decent pay and working conditions. For their part, employers will need to reevaluate the workplace, demonstrate trust in their employees, invest in professional development, and accommodate new work patterns.

The second challenge in 2022 is to stem the global trend toward authoritarianism. According to Freedom House, the pandemic has weakened checks and balances on government power in at least 80 countries, both rich and poor. Government surveillance, police brutality, and detention have increased, and in many countries free media and expression have been threatened or curtailed. Vulnerable groups such as ethnic and religious minorities and migrants have suffered disproportionately.

Political corruption is flourishing, too. In Mauritania, according to the Freedom House report, ministers of the ruling party misused COVID-19 funds. In 2020, the prime minister and entire cabinet resigned. In the United Kingdom, Conservative Party members and supporters were given special “fast-track” access to bid for contracts to supply personal protective equipment.

In dozens of countries worldwide, elections have been postponed or canceled, or certified results have been questioned. In 2022, citizens will need to find ways to hold their leaders accountable and to rebuild institutions and public trust. In some countries, this is already happening, reflecting how well governments do five things: provide or regulate public services; anticipate change and protect citizens; use power and public resources ethically; consult their citizens and explain their decisions to them; and improve living conditions for all.

The third challenge the world faces in 2022 is another pandemic. Although it is easy to think that COVID-19 eclipses all other public-health emergencies in our lifetime, our current focus must not blind us to other threats from infectious diseases. Earlier this month, for example, the UK’s chief veterinary officer warned of a “phenomenal level” of avian flu, with “huge human, animal, and trade implications.”

In 2021, the world failed to distribute vaccines, treatments, and therapies for COVID-19 equitably or efficiently. The COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility was created to ensure immunization for all, thereby containing mutations of the virus and its spread. But wealthy governments instead competed to secure access to the vaccines for their citizens first.

Trust and cooperation among governments is not an impossible ideal. The key is to design rules, institutions, and policy implementation in a way that assures countries that everyone is (mostly) complying. A deep flaw at the heart of the COVID-19 response has been a lack of transparency about how much governments are paying for vaccine doses – and to whom. In 2022, the world must urgently redesign and improve the global arrangements for vaccine research, distribution, and financing in order to ensure the minimum level of trust needed to make international cooperation possible.

Finally, COVID-19 is transforming the economic rulebook for 2022. Economic nationalism is rising, accelerated by countries’ experiences trying to procure equipment, treatments, and vaccines. Add to this the desire to achieve net-zero emissions targets, and the result likely will be a proliferation of industrial policies, more protectionist trade measures, and greater skepticism toward foreign investors – all against a backdrop of tighter monetary policy and rising government debt.

These trends are heightened by geopolitical alliances and rivalries, which are spilling over into economic deal-making. India and Russia recently stepped up their cooperation by signing 28 agreements in areas ranging from military cooperation to trade. And the European Union is now self-consciously adopting a defense and military planning term, “open strategic autonomy,” to frame its new approach to trade. Taiwan is a good example of how security concerns are being blurred with economic objectives. Its sovereignty has become bound up with a competition for control over the much-sought-after high-grade semiconductors it produces.

The global economic challenges for 2022 are sobering. But even at the height of the Cold War, basic international agreements and institutions of mutual restraint were possible thanks to patient negotiation and arrangements that gave assurances to both sides. Trust is not a panacea to rising international tension, but a modicum of it, backed by broadly credible institutions, will be vital to contain that tension.

There will be no return to the status quo ante after COVID-19, because the pandemic has changed too many things. The challenge for the coming year is to move forward by redesigning and reimagining our rules and institutions with an eye toward reestablishing trust in the domains of work, politics, public health, and economic policy.

Editor’s Note: Ngaire Woods is Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of The Reporter.

contributed Ngaire Woods