Learning the lessons of 2020: health, economy and employment
Audio 04:01
Gilles Yabi is the founder of the Dakar-based think-tank Wathi.
Gilles Yabi's personal archives
By: Gilles Yabi Follow
8 min
The year 2020 has been trying for a very large part of humanity and if Africa has not experienced the dreaded health disaster at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has not been spared, nor on the health plan, even less economically and socially.
Publicity
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Indeed.
While the health consequences of Covid-19, particularly in West and Central Africa, remain below that observed in the north and south of the continent and even more so in Europe and the Americas, the economic cost and social impact of the pandemic is considerable.
In reality, this means that over time, the indirect consequences on the health of African populations could be significant, as the effect of the diversion of attention and resources to the detriment of other diseases and prevention of malaria for example and the impoverishment effect of States and households causing a fall in health expenditure.
The health cost of the pandemic is therefore not limited to the number of direct victims of the new coronavirus, which has also started to rise in several countries in the region.
It will be necessary to remain extremely vigilant during the months to come.
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The economic and social impact of the pandemic in West Africa is considerable but you stress the diversity of national economic situations and perspectives.
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Yes.
GDP in West Africa is expected to contract by 2.0% overall in 2020, down 6 percentage points from the 4% economic growth that was forecast in the pre-Covid-19 outlook, according to the latest report from the African Development Bank.
However, it is necessary to underline the diversity of the effects of the health crisis on the various national economies.
In West Africa, it is Nigeria, the great economic and demographic power, which suffers the most important economic shock, with a projection of a negative growth rate of -4.4% of the GDP, due to the fall in oil prices and measures to contain the pandemic.
The Cape Verde archipelago, one of the countries renowned for the quality of its governance, is expected to experience a recession of around -4% following the interruption of tourism on which it is very dependent.
Countries with more diversified economies, such as Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal, Benin, where there was a strong growth dynamic driven by significant public investment before the pandemic, should escape the recession but not to a sharp slowdown.
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However, you believe that the health crisis is an opportunity to re-examine the priorities in African countries and you intend to focus in 2021 on the promotion of local production and the structural transformation of economies ...
" Indeed. For us, the health crisis will only remind us of the urgency to look at the demographic, educational and economic data on our region as they are and to draw the most obvious implications. The future of our region will depend largely on the capacity to educate and train the young people of today, those of tomorrow, and to create massively millions of jobs. On December 22, we published a document on lessons for the economies of West Africa with the main message of the imperative to refocus on the local production of basic goods and services, to support, modernize, transform the informal economy into a productive, innovative and inclusive popular economy and relaunch industrialization through assumed public policies targeting high-potential economic activities according to the natural and human resources of each country. We do not see how African countries will be able to create the millions of jobs necessary for young people today and tomorrow if we continue to lock ourselves in the export of natural resources in a rough state or almost and in the importation. the simplest consumer goods that we can and should be able to produce locally.
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