Africa Up Close

The year 2020 will live in infamy as the global economy reels under the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that has seriously impacted lives, jobs, and trade. The virus has so far claimed 582,125 lives and infected more than thirteen million people globally. African countries are already challenged in stemming the spread of the virus, but the task is even more complicated for countries that are constitutionally mandated to hold elections during this unprecedented time. COVID-19 mitigation measures during elections have massive implications for peace and security in these countries, as the measures have the potential to upend the electoral process, lead to bans on campaigning, and abuse by incumbents.

A Somali man photographed after receiving remittances in Mogadishu, Somalia. Photo courtesy of AMISOM Public Information via Flickr Commons. 

The increasing importance of remittances in global financial flows has elicited calls by experts in the development community for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries to harness the enormous potential of remittances for development. In response to these calls, migration and remittances featured extensively in deliberations on financing implementation of the post-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Ebrié port in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“We went through, just in the last 20 years, this big debt forgiveness for a lot of African countries……now all of a sudden are we going to go through another cycle of that?” These were the remarks of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy at a press conference in Pretoria, South Africa in June 2019. He was, of course, referring to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative that was rolled out by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1996 with the noble mission of ensuring that “no poor country faces a debt burden it cannot manage.” The initiative resulted in billions [i] of dollars in debt relief for the world’s poorest countries—mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa.