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This article challenges the role of COVID‐19 crisis narratives in shaping social policy choices in Africa. The COVID‐19 pandemic has focused attention on Africa's vast informal economies, both as a symbol of the continent's intense vulnerability to the ravages of the pandemic, and as a puzzle in the face of the uneven and limited effects of COVID‐19 across the continent. Indeed, an examination of statistical and documentary evidence reveals an inverse relationship between COVID‐19 fatalities and the size of African informal economies, and a perverse relationship between best‐practice COVID social protection responses and levels of COVID‐19 mortality. Scrutinizing the evidence behind African COVID‐19 crisis narratives raises questions about the ability of donor‐led digitized social protection paradigms to address social needs in highly informalized, low‐resource environments. This article highlights the role of crisis narratives as an exercise of power geared to remastering, homogenizing and reimagining African informal economies in ways that facilitate particular types of development intervention, sidelining alternative, more socially grounded policy perspectives. Through a closer examination of historical and contemporary realities in Africa's vast and varied informal economies, the article highlights the need to decolonize social policy by privileging local needs and policy perspectives over global policy agendas in the interest of transformative rather than palliative policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The informal economy absorbs a large share (more than 80%) of the labour force in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We examine whether a high level of informality tends to exacerbate the spread of the COVID-19. Using publicly available data for a cross-section of 46 SSA, we find evidence that confirms this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa was once expected to be the heartland of COVID-19 cases and deaths—a monumental disaster waiting to happen. Yet, while Africa accounts for 17.2 percent of the world population, it thus far accounts for only 4 percent of COVID-19 deaths and 2.7 percent of cases globally. What does this appreciable disparity reveal or occlude about the management of public health emergencies in African cities? This essay explores lessons learned from addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in urban Africa, ranging from early and aggressive responses to community-led initiatives and sound public health policies derived from longstanding experience with infectious disease such as the Ebola epidemic. COVID-19, I argue, opens a critical space for defamiliarizing commonsense representations of African cities. We must move beyond the default assumption that “cities in Africa just don’t work” and instead pay critical attention to hybrid and adaptive governance systems emerging across urban Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of people living with disabilities in Africa already face a heightened risk of poverty, which will likely be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic unless interventions to address its social and economic impacts are disability inclusive. This paper draws on research on health and living circumstances of people with disabilities in Africa in the context of human and disability rights as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). The paper also explores the pathways through which the current pandemic may increase the risk of poverty amongst people with disabilities, such as loss of income from disruptions to work, particularly in the informal sector, and higher future spending and productivity losses from disruptions to health care and other key services (e.g., rehabilitation, assistive devices). It also explores how social and economic responses to contain and respond to the pandemic should consider and be inclusive of the needs of people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]