Paper Short Abstract:

COVID 19 illustrates how the official prejudice against Africa’s large urban informal sector was carried over in the aggressive top-down measures enforced to contain the pandemic in African cities. This misguided approach caused considerable harm, and has raised serious human rights and equity concerns for future healthcare in Africa.

Paper Abstract:

Conventional town planning in Africa tends to view the continent’s large informal sector as ‘a chaotic jumble of unproductive activates’ that should be removed through forced eviction and repression. But this sector supports local livelihoods and income, and helps to alleviate poverty and provide some degree of social protection. The initial information about COVID19 and its control were based on data from high and middle income countries. Sadly, the aggressive measures adopted to contain the pandemic in Africa did not sufficiently take into account the local cultures and social economy of the region, and therefore affected informal sector workers and informal settlements disproportionately. Most informal sector workers depend for their daily earnings on constant movement and interaction outside the home, and were therefore exposed to constant harassment by the police and other state officials who enforced COVID restrictions on movement. Informal settlements are usually overcrowded, with limited access to water and sanitation needed to comply with COVID protocols for social/physical distancing, hand washing, etc. Informal sector operators were not carried along in COVID control policies, and had only limited access to the palliatives provided by government and humanitarian organizations. With hindsight, many more people died from damage done by stringent COVID policies than from the virus! We argue that for the future government officials, who aspire to international standards of urban modernity, and adopt the prescriptions of the global community, must learn to strike a balance between the ideals of international standards, and the reality of local conditions and requirements