“Change can be daunting, but it is far less scary than the alternative. Radical changes in government policy, in business behaviour and in our personal choices over the past 18 months demonstrate that previously unthinkable actions can be undertaken.”
“Our collective failure to end the pandemic now will create and compound even deeper and more costly problems in the future. The immediate knock-on effects, including for the West, will be severe. But this historic failure of multilateralism is also undermining the trust and incentives necessary for effective international cooperation on the other existential challenges of the day – most notably, climate change.”
“Leadership and tough negotiations with drug companies is required to avoid wastage, increase weekly COVID-19 vaccination numbers and prevent a slowdown in the national roll-out.”
“We can count how many amazing things COVID-19 took away from us, and we can also choose to see what COVID-19 has done for us.”
“International credit-rating agencies perennially assign overinflated risks to Africa, irrespective of its improving macroeconomic fundamentals or the global economic environment. These ‘perception premiums’ are one of the region’s biggest development challenges.”
“The world has been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health crisis, but it’s time we shift gears and recognise it for the global humanitarian emergency that it is.”
“To end this pandemic, high-income countries with a vaccine pipeline for adequate coverage of their populations should, alongside their own scale-ups, immediately commit to providing the 92 low- and middle-income countries of Gavi’s COVAX Advance Market Commitment with at least 1 billion vaccine doses by no later than September 2021, reaching more than 2 billion doses by mid-2022.”
“We are not out of the woods and each one of us must be responsible and not let down our guard lest we end up like India.”
“The best global response to a potential pandemic is to prevent an outbreak in the first place. That involves better sanitation and protection in factory farms, live animal markets, hospitals and laboratories.”
“Measures like lockdowns, social distancing, work from home and travel restrictions significantly affected the economy. The aviation sector and related services were one of the worst hit.”
A hub for information, analysis, and the global response to COVID-19’s impact on Africa