In May, the Driftwood Club, a popular beach hotel in Malindi, closed its doors to the public, becoming one of the many hotels in the Kenyan seaside to shut down permanently. Earlier this year, Old Man and the Sea, one of the oldest and most iconic fish restaurants in this coastal town, also closed. Tourism is the economic backbone of Kenya’s coastal region. Foreign, mainly Italian, tourists usually start trickling into Malindi in July, at the start of the summer...
COVID-19 has exposed fault lines in both rich and poor countries. From failing public healthcare systems to racial inequality, the pandemic has laid bare unjust and inequitable structures that are failing the most vulnerable and marginalised groups. Poverty levels are rising globally. Between 88 million and 115 million more people were pushed into poverty in 2020 because of the pandemic, according to the World Bank. In South Africa, the pandemic exacerbated inequality levels. This was evident during the protests and...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. While Western nations are focusing their attention on their post-COVID economic recovery, Kenya is confronting a crisis with far-reaching social and economic consequences: rising poverty levels. Kenya gained an additional 2 million “new poor” as of last November due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the World Bank’s Kenya Economic Update. “The pandemic is inflicting tragic loss of life and human suffering...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. EU countries will issue a COVID-19 vaccine certificate that excludes key vaccines distributed through the COVAX facility – which is financed by many of the same countries – placing Africans at a unique disadvantage. Africans who have expressed concern over the extremely stringent and punitive visa application procedures of EU countries now have to contend with another barrier to their entry to Europe....
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. Tanzania’s new president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, is slowly reversing the COVID-19 policies of her predecessor, the late John Magufuli, who infamously declared that the coronavirus had been defeated in the country. He banned the publication of official data and reports on the disease, even as doctors privately reported a rise in the number of patients with COVID symptoms dying in hospitals. Despite being...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a “shadow pandemic” across the globe: domestic violence cases have risen dramatically since pandemic-induced lockdowns and school closures last year, and women and girls are at greater risk of sexual abuse. According to a UN Women report, reports of domestic violence increased by 30% in France in the first few weeks of the start of the pandemic. In...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. Tanzania’s new president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, is slowly reversing the COVID-19 policies of her predecessor, the late John Magufuli, who infamously declared that the coronavirus had been defeated in the country. He banned the publication of official data and reports on the disease, even as doctors privately reported a rise in the number of patients with COVID symptoms dying in hospitals. Despite being...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. While Ethiopia is struggling to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, another life-threatening crisis is going largely unnoticed. Famine looms for millions of Ethiopians in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, where an alliance of the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF), Amhara militia, and the Eritrean Defence Force (EDF) has gone to war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an armed rebel...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. African governments have been urging rich countries to make COVID-19 vaccines more accessible to their citizens. But some countries on the continent are either returning the vaccines or destroying them, a scenario that indicates significant weaknesses in both the supply and demand side of mass vaccination programmes. Vaccines are going to waste in some African countries because there isn’t sufficient uptake; in...