Everywhere you look, and even if you didn’t realise it, countries are using social protection to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic on a massive scale. Whether it is huge unemployment support packages in the UK and France, new and adapted cash transfer, food voucher, and school feeding...
The Covid-19 pandemic and related physical distancing measures hit the poorest hardest. This is a universal issue. Many in the global North live one paycheck away from catastrophe, many in the South live a day’s work away from hunger and starvation. The haunting images of laborers fleeing...
Social distancing has probably been the most debated term in context of the Covid 19 crisis globally. However, not everyone may be able to practice it properly due to space constraints. In this co-authored blog for Govern, a governance innovation lab in India, Devanik Saha, a PhD researcher at...
According to the ILO’s latest estimates, almost 70% of the labour force in developing and emerging economies is in the informal economy. For Africa, the figure is 85%. Considering its sheer size, and the resulting loss in tax income that is often assumed to go along with it, governments across...
In a remote village on the Uganda-DRC border, the collective memory of the last Ebola outbreak is very clear, but talk from neighbours and the radio is now about a new ‘corona’ disease. A local researcher for the pandemic preparedness project, Moses Baluku, has been discovering how these...
Poverty puts people at greater risk of getting infected with coronavirus, and also makes them carry the brunt of its economic fallout. This transcends traditional boundaries of the ‘Global South’ and ‘Global North’ with consequences felt by people living in precarious conditions across...
“These Hazaras go to Iran and bring viruses to Pakistan”, was the accusation made in a WhatsApp conversation which recently went viral across WhatsApp groups in Quetta, Pakistan. In it, two people can be heard cursing the Hazara Shias as potential transmitters of covid-19. One of the...