Rethinking Covid-19 Lockdown-policy Interim Influence on African Economies

Abstract

accuracy of data collected World Health 17th April, 2020 Africa Coronavirus epicenter. a queue by the WHO best-case scenario regarding governments introduction of intense social distancing, once a threshold of deaths per 100,000 people per week occurs, Africa is likely to record 122 million infections, 2.3 million quarantines and 300, 000 death toll. On another study the WHO Office for Africa equally projected that up to 190,000 people could die in the first year of the disease if containment measures did not work out. COVID-19 the existing structural and institutional aspects of Africa’s economy Abstract: The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak brought the world to a standstill having triggered a global lockdown of movements and economic activities. Governments were compelled to enforce social distancing policies comprising practices meant to minimize physical contacts to a reasonable extent. These helped in containing the spread of the pandemic in Africa, as elsewhere. The lockdowns jeopardized the flow of trade across the globe, which particularly spelt panic in Africa, where short and long-term impact on the economies could be more devastating. Against this backdrop, the paper attempts to determine the extent of damage COVID-19 lockdown saga has inflicted on the hitherto impoverished African economies and the way forward. The analytical framework for the paper is anchored on the dependency theory while the secondary source of data collection and analysis was employed. It found that after the COVID-19 lockdowns, most African economies have declined further than they were before the outbreak of the disease. As a remedy, African states should strive to adopt stringent and viable strategies to reconstruct their economies by cutting down on costs and frivolous spending. Furthermore, the adoption of prudent revenue drive is advocated coupled with encouraging local and foreign direct investments, in order to stay afloat. reported of the pandemic. These could be used to generalize the propensity of spread of the in since were picked from central, east, west, north and southern Africa. A random observation of the increase over the stipulated period also shows there is a COVID-19 ‘red alert’ for the if the is not nipped in the