Gordon Brown, once the UK prime minister, made an appeal earlier this month for rich countries and institutions not to forget the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the rest of the world.
Speaking ahead of the recent meeting of G20 finance ministers in Indonesia, Brown was warning against donor fatigue and pleading for the inclusion of the pandemic in the meeting’s main agenda rather than its relegation to a place in AOB (any other business).
Brown has been praised for his role in the redesigning of the international financial architecture in the wake of the global financial crisis. He also deserves credit for his grasp of detail, which is evident in this appeal and which provides a welcome change from the generalities and buzzwords favoured by many politicians.
He noted that the ACT-Accelerator, the global umbrella group of nine international agencies mandated to provide a full medical response to the pandemic for poorer countries, was USD16bn short in its appeal for funding.
The international community has good intentions although its efforts have been constrained by the emergence of new crises, notably climate change and now Ukraine
Brown quoted an estimate that citizens of rich countries need contribute only US10 cents per week to raise the required funds. At the back of his mind was his experience that donors (indeed most human beings) focus on the most recent crisis. The same can be said of the media.
The rich world started to take the pandemic seriously in Q1 2020 but has since seen climate change take its place at the top of the agenda as a result of COP26 in Glasgow in November. The needle moved again last week with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It is not that Western decision takers are heartless and do not care about the ravages of Covid-19 in low-income countries. The unprecedented rapid response of the IMF in April 2020 tells us otherwise. The data monitor of Johns Hopkins University in the US provides a clue, however.
Almost 100,000 South Africans have died from the pandemic according to the monitor. In three North African countries the death toll has ranged between 15,000 and 30,000 but elsewhere on the continent the number of casualties has been well below 10,000. These low figures can encourage the view that we must “learn to live” with the virus.
The sixth AU-EU summit in Brussels earlier this month again showed that the international community has its heart in the right place as well as flagging up an obstacle or two. The agreed EUR150bn investment package has an important health component.
However, the EU was unwilling to grant a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights, without which it would be difficult to manufacture vaccines on the continent. On the fringes of the summit the WHO, one of three drivers of the Covax initiative to create global equitable access to vaccines, named six African countries (including Nigeria) as the likely first beneficiaries of the technology transfer to produce mRNa vaccines.
The EU may yet relent on this point, which would be a transformative step. Incidentally the summit was told that 11.3 per cent of Africans had been fully vaccinated against Covid, which compares very poorly with other continents but is still higher than other figures we have seen.
To flag up a second obstacle, the declaration emerging from the summit hoped that rich countries would reallocate up to USD100bn in SDRs granted them by the IMF in August 2021 to the poorest states, most of which are African. The total allocation was USD650bn, of which about USD275bn went to emerging and developing countries (and just USD21bn to low-income countries).
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We would welcome such voluntary transfers but caution that the most indebted states and those most in need of reallocations in their favour tend to score poorly on governance. We will not name names but rich countries are bound by domestic policy constraints (and are answerable to their taxpayers).
To take the bigger global picture, there appears to be a two-speed recovery from the pandemic. This is the view of the World Bank (and the IMF). Those countries with the most to throw at the problem generally took the largest hits in 2020 but have since recovered most quickly thanks to their access to fiscal resources and vaccines.
In contrast, African countries have seen far fewer deaths from Covid but have also suffered from fewer resources (and vaccines) to fight it. In December 2020 the Central Bank of Egypt released a clear note about the measures it had taken to combat the pandemic: they are numerous but dwarfed by those of industrialized countries.
The international community has good intentions although its efforts have been constrained by the emergence of new crises, notably climate change and now Ukraine.
It has finite resources as well as its own interests to uphold (such as intellectual property rights in the EU’s case) and legitimate concerns over governance. Reluctantly, we should temper our expectations of the community’s response.
Kronsten is a consultant on Africa economics and finance
