Malice knows how to protect his family against coronavirus. As often as he can afford it, the 68-year-old buys a single bar of soap for his two wives and dozen children.
It is usually finished within two days, and then he must scrounge the money — the equivalent of 16 US cents — for another. And that is if the family has enough water leftover from their daily allocation to wash.
“Imagine people who don’t even have enough water to drink,” he said from a crowded camp in central Mali, west Africa, where armed extremist groups and local conflicts have forced thousands to flee their homes. “How can they wash their hands several times a day? With what water? How can they buy soap, masks?”
Malice is among tens of millions of people around the world displaced by conflict, violence and natural disasters, whose already fraught existence is threatened further by coronavirus. Crammed into camps where social distancing is impossible, hygiene is poor and medical care rudimentary, the world’s most vulnerable people are at the greatest risk, amid a global shutdown that is making humanitarian support more difficult.
“We fear the virus would be next to impossible to stop in places where people live side-by-side with inadequate sanitation and shelter,” said Patrick Youssef, Africa director for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “Our best line of defence today for communities where physical distancing is impossible is to make sure people have accurate information . . . and to make sure people have access to water, soap and basic hygiene.”
“We are in a race against time,” he added.
Africa is the region least affected by the virus, with about 33,000 confirmed cases and 1,500 deaths as of Tuesday, but it seems to be roughly tracking Europe’s trajectory.
In Syria, where 6.1m people have been displaced during a nine-year civil war, the official number of cases and deaths is also low but climbing. In Bangladesh, where more than 850,000 Rohingya live in camps along the Myanmar border, aid workers have called Covid-19 “a ticking time bomb”.
Though there is hope that social and environmental factors could spare some of the most vulnerable places from the worst of the outbreak, other forecasts are more alarming. The International Rescue Committee warned on Tuesday that up to 1bn people could become infected with Covid-19 and 3.2m people could die in just 34 conflict-affected and fragile countries if more preventive measures are not taken.
Groups such as the IRC, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council are doing what they can. At the Doucoumbo camp in Mali where Malice lives, NRC, which relayed Malice’s responses to the FT’s questions, is educating residents, digging wells to boost water access and providing hygiene products.
But calls for increased humanitarian funding have gone unanswered. Financing is expected to be cut further as recession bites, even as the number displaced within their own countries has spiked to a record 45.7m, according to data published this week by the NRC’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
With almost 26m refugees living in other countries, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s Refugee Agency, more than 70m people are displaced around the world.
“We are in a humanitarian crisis already . . . and now we are close to a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Xavier Creach, regional co-ordinator for the Sahel at UNHCR.
Most IDPs do not live in formal camps but with host communities who share meagre supplies with their displaced guests. And those groups will find their resources reduced further by the disruption of coronavirus restrictions, Mr Creach said.
In total, 19.1m people in the Sahel will fall into food insecurity this year between harvests, compared with 10.8m last year, the World Food Programme said this month, citing the impact of lockdowns on humanitarian supply chains.
WFP has said it is scrambling to replace manufacturers in France and India that produce much of the food it distributes. Both countries have shut or severely curtailed manufacturing.
In Syria, where 1.8m people were displaced by fighting in 2019 alone — the highest number in the world — food prices have more than doubled within a year, according to the UN’s food aid agency.
In the north-west, where jihadist opposition groups still control territory, a survey “found there were [on average] nine people living in a tent”, according to Misty Buswell, policy and advocacy director for IRC in the Middle East.
In rural, north-east Nigeria, which has wrestled with its own Islamist insurgency for a decade, the situation is similarly dire.
Aba Goni lives in Borno state’s Dalori camp with 22,000 other displaced people. He said that, so far, the residents of the camp are doing their best to wash their hands frequently and maintain social distance. But Borno announced a lockdown last week after recording its first death from Covid-19 — an MSF medic. Fear is spreading.
“Initially when we get our small money we go out to buy our onions, condiments and food items to bring into the camp,” he said, via audio clips sent by the ICRC. “Now the state is locking down, and it will affect us seriously.”
