Tribune. The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us to no longer take lightly the crises that erupt far from us. Any event, wherever it occurs, can affect the entire world population. This is why it is so important to tackle the repercussions and the legacy the pandemic is leaving in Africa.
If the health shock is to date better controlled there than elsewhere, it could however be more lasting, deep and destabilizing for the whole planet. Within a year, the pandemic interrupted a growth dynamic that had been in place for twenty-five years, disrupted value chains and caused an unprecedented increase in inequality and poverty.
It is not only the African continent that risks being deprived of access to emergence, it is the whole world that could lose one of the future engines of global growth.
Africa has all the assets to overcome the shock of the pandemic and pull the whole world with it towards a new cycle of sustainable growth: the most enterprising and innovative youth in the world, natural resources that can fuel an industrial base local, a particularly ambitious continental integration project. But Africa does not have the tools to recover from a shock as massive as it was unforeseen.
Limits of solidarity
While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that African countries will need $ 285 billion [environ 234 milliards d’euros] additional funding by 2025, there is no stimulus plan or monetary creation mechanism in place to mobilize such resources. In other words, while other regions foresee a rapid recovery of their economies, Africa is not fighting on an equal footing in the face of the pandemic and the risk exists that an economic and social crisis will not allow it to recover. offer their youth the opportunities they have a right to expect.
International solidarity was there and bore fruit from the start of the pandemic. By the immediate suspension of debt service by the G20 for the poorest countries. Through exceptional financial aid implemented by the IMF, the World Bank and other donors, including European ones.
But the mechanisms on which we have founded this solidarity for several decades now find their limits. They are weakened in the short term by the vaccine emergency and the risk of massive inequality in access to the vaccine. They are weakened by the risk of a great economic divergence that no emergency mechanism seems able to stop.
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