The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Unemployment, Market, Livelihoods, and Food Security in Africa

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Unemployment, Market, Livelihoods, and Food Security in Africa

Ebrima Ceesay
DOI: 10.4018/IJICTHD.2021070103
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Abstract

This paper assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on unemployment, market, livelihoods, and food security in Africa. The data use in this paper was generated from online survey questionnaire in which the participants were asked about certain questions in which COVID-19 affects their social-economic situation. The questionnaire was design to help Africans to understand COVID-19's impact on their social and economic live. The results of this study reveal that coronavirus pandemic affected Africa in a number of ways: 1) 51.6% responded in Africa that coronavirus affected their job search while 45.2% said it did not affect their job search. 2) In Africa, 55.8% said they still can access the market in the past 7 days, and 30.2% said they cannot access the market due to certain conditions or restrictions and lockdowns. 3) 45% said the main reason they and the peoples in their respective households could not access the market or stores during the coronavirus pandemic is due to movement restriction imposed by government.
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1. Introduction

This paper assesses the impacts of covid-19 on socio-economic situation in Africa. Coronavirus pandemic which had created from the Wuhan Province of China in last part of December 2019. It instigated increasing quickly in China and to other parts of the world through the movement of people in late 2019 and early 2020. The feast of COVID-19 pandemic pretentious economic undertakings in China, the Chinese economy came to a standstill. China is a major exporter of producer and consumer commodities to Africa, and the economic reduction in China is anticipated to have spillover effects for Africa through the deleterious effect on African trades that depend on deeply on China for the supply of primary and intermediate raw materials. The coronavirus crisis is affecting many African countries, and the number of confirmed cases have been rising rapidly with a particularly severe situation in South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Cameroon. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, maximum of the healthcare infrastructure in African countries had worsened . Some private hospitals rejected to admit sick patients whereas public hospitals surpassed their volume. This pressured the government of some countries to build isolation centers in large open fields around the country; notably, football stadiums were converted to isolation centers in countries such as Cameroon and Nigeria. In African countries where good healthcare systems exist, the government had to scale-up intensive care units and provide more resources for hospitals and healthcare systems to control the spread of coronavirus. The plain social consequence of the coronavirus crisis was fingered through the burden of movement limitations in numerous African countries. These measures inevitably affected economic activities in African countries, and because of the peoples in African countries are not versatile to operate jobs from home and even the government lack certain understand and lack human capita based that have that knowledge to operate from home and contributes effectively and efficiency to the economic growth and development. Most central banks applied fiscal policy, monetary policy and exchange rate policy to stabilize the economic in both the long run and short dynamics.

The emergent coronavirus literature has discovered the effect of the coronavirus predicament by single-day data, two-day data etc. and they typically emphasis on a exact sector like tourism industry sector (Gossling et al., 2020), the mining sector as part of industrial sector (Laing, 2020), or the economy (Fernandes, 2020; Ozili and Arun, 2020; Fornaro and Wolf, 2020). first, this study contributes to the recent literature on the impact of coronavirus in society (e.g Fornaro and Wolf, 2020). The paper contributes to this literature by exploring the socio-economic effect of coronavirus in Africa by looking at the context that was not mention in the literatures such as the online research methodology. The main objective of the paper is to assess the impacts of covid-19 on the social-economic live and livelihoods of the people in Africa, specifically; 1) the sectors’ that made up the economy, 2) perception of the people 3) social distancing 4) job search 5) Private financial situation, 6) prevention method of covid-19 pandemic etc. The paper follow this formatting. Section 2 presents the brief literature review. Section 3 current statistic of covid-19 in the World and Africa Section 4 the online research methodology. Section 5 the results. Section 6 concludes and policy implication.

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