Lockdown: #firstworldproblems

Lockdowns are easing across Europe, and thoughts are already turning to the little things that have been missed in the weeks when coronavirus held sway over our lives. While confinement in the northern hemisphere has brought multiple challenges and problems, most of these are insignificant when compared to those faced by the global poor.

Communities living in the slums and townships in urban areas of global cities are likely to have had by far the worst of it and sub-Saharan Africa will no doubt face very particular challenges. From the townships of South Africa, to the slums of Nairobi, the urban poor already face a range of health risks and the COVID-19 pandemic is going to make things a whole lot harder.

1)    Social distancing – difficult, if not impossible, for families living in one or two room dwellings in informal settlements. In many slums and most townships, households live directly adjacent to each other and often face each other across narrow access paths where any outside activity would entail close contact with neighbours. The rate of infection in sub-Saharan Africa is still relatively low, but the potential for a dramatic increase is looming. As Mike Ryan from the World Health Organisation has summed it up, poverty is “the tinder in which this epidemic may explode.”

2)    Ventilation – some of the best houses in South Africa’s townships are like mansions in terms of their scale and access to amenities, but the poorest residents of places like Soweto, or Alexandra Township live in shacks with little or no ventilation.  Because cooking mostly takes place inside the home, respiratory illnesses and diseases are common. With the southern hemisphere winter on its way, the combination of these illnesses and COVID-19 infection could prove deadly.

3)    Food – If you have no electricity or appliances and your main source of food is a local market, shopping to put a meal on the table is a daily chore. It’s doubly problematic if you have lost your job in the economic downturn and the price of basic goods on the market is rising. An estimated 4 billion people – half the world’s population – have access to either inadequate, or non-existent, government-funded, social safety nets. If they lose work, they have nothing to fall back on. The coronavirus pandemic is affecting access to food, making it a big issue for the urban poor and with the potential for unemployment growing, it is not going to get any easier.

4)    Schools – More than 300 million children are out of school across the world and they have lost access to education as well as free school meals. As my World Food Programme colleague, Carmen Burbano, put it, “We can shift to online learning, but not online eating.”  When a child is out of school, they miss free meals and snacks. Their families also carry the additional burden of feeding them at a time when food is more expensive. The end result: children will eat less food and what they do eat will be less healthy and nutritious.

5)    Violence – Any lengthy confinement in cramped conditions in an environment where poverty is increasing is only likely to exacerbate inter-personal tensions and the potential for violence will grow. Domestic violence is a scourge wherever it occurs, and women and girls are most likely to suffer first. The COVID-19 pandemic will have heightened these tensions and violence inside the home – and beyond - is only likely to rise. As the saying goes: “A hungry man is an angry man.”