ASCL Seminar: The COVID-19 Pandemic Response and Africa's New Era of Austerity

With Africa's median age under 20, COVID-19 was never likely to be a major health concern on the continent. Nevertheless, the declaration of a pandemic in March 2020 saw the World Health Organization recommend the same lockdown measures in all countries regardless of population profile or socioeconomic frameworks. With 85% of African workers in the informal sector, transport shutdowns, market curfews, agricultural restrictions, and global travel bans have combined to end the economic booms of the 2010s and bring about what economists are calling Africa's "new era of austerity". This lecture by Prof. Toby Green (King's College London) interrogates the processes by which this enormous and highly gendered increase in economic inequality came about on the continent. How do academic concepts of agency, extraversion, and neoliberalism help us to understand this socioeconomic calamity, whose consequences will last for years?

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