Covid-19 in the Horn of Africa: Gaining trust in a crisis

Annette Weber

No 20/2020, SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Abstract: On reaching the Horn of Africa, the corona virus will have encountered countries already facing a multitude of challenges. Prolonged armed conflict, drought and insecurity have turned more than eight million people into refugees in their own countries, and a further 3.5 million have fled to neighbouring countries where they live in overcrowded refugee camps. All the countries in this region are in a fragile state of political transformation or have been severely weakened by war and govern­ment failures. They possess neither the capacity to contain the Covid pandemic nor to mitigate the resulting unemployment, poverty and hunger. In order to guard against jeopardising the process of democratisation in Sudan and Ethiopia, special emphasis should be placed on social security systems and gaining the trust of the popu­lation. This requires an emergency aid package from abroad that will ensure the economic survival of all countries in the region. However, long-term support should be con­ditional on guaranteeing that most of the investment goes into developing state capacities for critical infrastructure and social security.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256615/1/2020C20.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:swpcom:202020

DOI: 10.18449/2020C20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().