“Sub-Saharan Africa is facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis that threatens to throw the region off its stride, reversing the development progress of recent years and slow the region’s growth prospects in the years to come. The Covid-19 pandemic has spread through almost all countries. And as in the rest of the world, the health crisis has precipitated an economic crisis.”
“Our estimates suggest a two-week lockdown extension results in an average three percentage points reduction in annual consumer spending that year. This figure increases to just under nine percentage points if the lockdown is extended by five weeks.”
“The shock of COVID-19 has been large across asset classes, but the blow to corporate bond markets was
particularly pronounced. Issuance in primary markets stopped, mutual funds saw sizeable outflows, and
secondary market yield spreads to government securities widened very rapidly.”
“Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been significantly impacted by the ongoing coronavirus outbreak and is forecast to fall sharply from 2.4% in 2019 to -2.1 to -5.1% in 2020, the first recession in the region over the past 25 years.”
“The immediate goal in the lockdown must be to ensure that a temporary problem does not become permanent - through needless permanent alienation from work or business, fiscal and/or financial instability, severe destitution, social instability, destruction of sections of economic activity and similar.”
“Delayed and cancelled flights, increased freight costs and a huge fall in demand have brought the flower trade to a virtual standstill, and some flower farms in Kenya have already gone out of business since lockdown began.”
“The number of recorded COVID-19 cases in Africa, at about 15,000 on April 14, is still relatively small, but it is growing fast. The continent has far fewer doctors, hospital beds, and ventilators per capita than any other region. A health crisis of significant proportions looms unless containment measures succeed… On the economic front, the crisis in jobs and livelihoods could be even greater.”
“In late 2019, before ‘threat to public security’ would have brought to mind a virus, most respondents in a national Afrobarometer survey said they would accept restrictions on their freedom of movement, such as curfews and roadblocks, if public safety were threatened. Residents of Greater Accra and Ashanti are the first to put this willingness to the test.”
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