The COVID-19 outbreak prompted the unforeseen and premature recess of many institutions of higher education in the global south as the safety of students and staff was a primary priority. To avoid losing time on the academic calendar, many institutions resorted to an adapted strategy of teaching and learning known as e-learning. E-learning requires one to have access to equipment, such as a laptop, and internet at home – two things that students in the global south did not previously need for higher education, nor would they have foreseen that they would need it. One of the defining characteristics of privilege is having access to resources to tend to unforeseen needs and wants—due to the prevailing inequality across the global south, there are many who do not have access to such resources. There is limited literature exploring the intersecting implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and privilege in the global south. In this commentary, the authors discuss how and why coping with the COVID-19 pandemic required a certain level of privilege for higher education students in the global south.
TopIntroduction
The term ‘global south’ is one that seeks to identify a group of countries and the characteristics that define those countries have been debated by numerous scholars and researchers over the years. The product of those debates has seen the emergence of many different definitions of the ‘global south’ but all of them are understood to accept that it refers to countries that are relatively less economically and industrially developed than the ‘global north’ which comprises of nations that typically have advanced economic and industrial development (Mataruse, 2022; Teferra, 2020). Furthermore, the ‘global south’ can be characterised as low to middle income countries (LMIC), densely populated countries, politically marginalised countries, and countries with limited infrastructure growth (Teferra, 2020)
Terminology relating to the ‘global south and global north’ agenda is part of a family of terms such as ‘first world and third world’ ‘core countries and periphery countries’, ‘developed and developing countries’, and ‘west and non-western countries’. It can be argued that the genesis of these terms is linked primarily to World Systems Theory discourse which draws on many academic disciplines to classify and understand social change in terms of culture, politics, economics, and development (Klak, 2014).
Early world-systems theories literature tended was conceptualised and penned in the West and it tended to overlook the importance of imperialism and its impact on the current state of cultural, political, economic, and developmental relations in many regions (Plys, 2021; Frame, 2022). Dados and Connell (2012) sought to posit that ‘global north and global south’ rhetoric needs to be more progressive by moving away from discourse which focuses squarely on present-day economic and developmental standing without exploring the implicit nuances of the pervasive historical impact of imperialism:
North-South terminology, then, like core-periphery, arose from an allegorical application of categories to name patterns of wealth, privilege, and development across broad regions. The term Global South functions as more than a metaphor for underdevelopment. It references an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained.
In this chapter, we draw on Dados and Conell’s conceptual interpretation of the global south to pose and discuss a very important and relevant topic in 2023, was COVID-19 a pandemic of privilege for higher education students in the global south? To answer this question, we will discuss the following topics as separate sections: 1) Privilege in context 2) Overview of challenges brought on by COVID-19, 3) Abrupt and unexpected closure of universities, 4) COVID-19 prevention and safety measures, and 5) access to e-learning tools. All of these sections will be discussed in the context of if and how higher education students needed to be in privileged positions to navigate the challenges presented.