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...
COVID-19
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...
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Tidal wave: COVID-19 cases are surging across Africa. The WHO said that confirmed cases rose by more than 20% since last week, calling for “urgent action” to curb the wave of infections. Uganda has seen an astonishing 2,800% rise in cases since last month, with reports of patients dying while waiting for a hospital bed. Rwanda, Namibia, and South Africa have also reintroduced restrictions in an effort to tackle the crisis. The African CDC Director John Nkenhasong warned...
On 12 March 2020, Kenya confirmed its first COVID-19 case. Since this ill-fated day, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the country and its economy. People are still trying to battle this virus, learn how to cope, and emerge stronger after the pandemic.
The economy, however, has since faced major setbacks in its growth. Kenya is Africa’s third-biggest economy and it has not suffered such a new low in 12 years since the post-election violence experienced in 2008. According to...
Africa saw its first reported case of COVID-19 in Egypt in February 2020, and then soon after the first case in sub-Saharan Africa was confirmed in Nigeria.
Within a few months, the pandemic spread throughout the continent, impacting peoples’ lives and livelihoods drastically, and majorly impacted the continent’s economies.
Here’s a closer look at COVID’s impact and why the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is key to helping African economies recover.
COVID-19’s effects on the economy
African economies suffered greatly from trade...
COVID-19 and its aftershocks are threatening to wipe out decades of hard-earned progress in the fight against extreme poverty. For the first time in more than 20 years, global poverty is on the rise. The World Bank estimated that the number of people living in extreme poverty globally increased by 120 million (including 40 million in Africa) in 2020 due to the pandemic. The outlook is grimmer still with a further increase of up to 40 million is projected...
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Turning point: This week’s G7 summit needs to be a “turning point” in the race to vaccinate the world against COVID-19. Joe Biden played the first card as he boarded Air Force 1 on Wednesday, promising to announce a major plan to vaccinate the world (more on that later). At ONE we’re joining 200 world leaders in calling for the G7 to do whatever it takes to beat the virus everywhere, starting with immediately sharing at least 1...
Nearly a year and a half into the crisis, COVID-19 has taken as many as 12.7 million lives and cost the world economy trillions of dollars.
The world is over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and we’ve seen some progress in global coordination to end it, including the Biden administration’s deal with Pfizer-BioNTech to purchase 500 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to share globally. But we need more global action to end the pandemic for everyone, everywhere.
The fastest way to do so and beat the virus is to ensure that everyone, regardless of where they live, has access to vaccines. Otherwise, the world is at...
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on Nigeria’s economy. Official statistics show that growth declined by 1.9% in 2020, but the fallouts will be far-reaching. Nigeria has significant underlying challenges that will make recovery difficult. It is the seventh most populous country in the world, with 70% of the population under the age of 30. It also has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Africa — two out of three young Nigerians (aged 15-24) are unemployed. Moreover, over 80...