Is it fair to see younger, healthy people in richer nations get injections before vulnerable people in poorer countries?
By Abdel Monem Fawzi
The problem is that more than 39 million vaccine doses had been given in 49 richer states – but one poor nation had only 25 doses.
“We need global solidarity and vaccine justice for Africa,” Dr Akinwumi Adesina Africa’s premier development bank chief said. He decried the lack of Covid-19 vaccines reaching Africa.
He underlined the stark disparities between vaccine acquisitions by several rich countries that have acquired sufficient vaccines to inoculate their populations twice over, as opposed to African countries that are primarily dependent on the World Health Organisation’s COVAX initiative for the minuscule quantities of vaccines acquired so far.
He said: “So far, 14.6 million vaccines have been delivered in Africa, but many people still cannot get shots in their arms. That is only 1 per cent of what we need. We are way off the mark in terms of getting to 60 per cent of herd immunity, and sadly, I do not see that happening for another year or two at this rate – not unless things change.”
According to Adesina, “We therefore need to improve Africa’s access to vaccines. COVAX is doing a great job but still, we need more. We need them in adequate quantity. We need them quickly and we need them at an affordable price.”
Acquiring vaccines has significant implications for African countries. As Adesina emphasised in a broader discussion with panelists at the launch of the African Economic Outlook 2021 –including Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences – for Africa, rapid vaccine acquisition is a matter of life and death. As elsewhere, Africa’s first priority is to prolong lives and preserve jobs.
From an economic perspective, Stiglitz agreed with Adesina that the slow pace of acquiring vaccines and arresting the pandemic will make stemming extreme poverty and negative economic growth difficult. They agreed that a comprehensive global plan was needed to help countries cope with mounting debt, which the pandemic had compounded.
Africa’s economy is expected to grow by 3.1 per cent in 2021. However, 39 million Africans could be pushed into extreme poverty this year because of the pandemic unless the international community takes the kind of action that Stiglitz and Adesina are calling for now.
The African Development Bank chief says: “As long as Africans remain unvaccinated, the world will go right back to square one.” He said no amount of ‘vaccine passports’ being advocated for by some developed countries could change that fact. “Africa needs to develop its pharmaceutical industry and begin manufacturing. The African Development Bank is going to support African countries to do this,” Adesina said.
He added that it was in the self-interest of advanced countries to make sure that everybody has access to the vaccine and other related medicines. “The longer the disease festers in any part of the world, it can mutate and one of the things we know is that those mutations are not going to respect borders. The Covid-19 virus doesn’t carry a passport.”
Adesina began the exchange by pointing out that Africa’s debt had climbed to around 70 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). He then sought Stiglitz’s views on the prevailing global debt architecture.
“That’s a question I’ve been very concerned with for a long time … You need debt restructuring, and that needs to be really high on the international agenda,” said Stiglitz, an American economist and a professor at Columbia University.
“Every country has bankruptcy laws but there’s no bankruptcy law for international debt,” Stiglitz added. “Remember, when there’s too much debt, it’s as much the creditor’s problem as the debtor’s problem.”
Adesina and Stiglitz went on to discuss recent debt relief efforts, including a debt standstill that the G20 group of wealthy nations presented to the world’s poorest countries in April 2020. Stiglitz said the standstill took place when it seemed the pandemic might only last a few months. “Now that it’s lasted a year, a standstill is not enough.”
This year’s African Economic Outlook highlights how the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to rising debt levels among African countries, and proposes remedies. Stiglitz said his proposal, an international debt framework, had to include the private sector, given its growing role as a source of government debt.
According to the African Economic Outlook, the share of commercial creditors in Africa’s external debt stock has more than doubled in the last two decades, from 17 per cent in 2000 to 40 per cent by the end of 2019.
Some hope has come in the form of new special drawing rights, potentially $500 billion, which the G20 pledged earlier in March to the International Monetary Fund to support poor countries. Adesina said the funds would “go a long way” to stabilising foreign reserves and the exchange rate, allowing countries to go back to the market.
Adesina said another solution could be to establish an African financial stabilisation mechanism where African countries can pool their funds, which would allow countries to have “endogenous” fiscal and monetary policies to ensure that you deal with “the cause of the illness…and not always the symptoms.”
“Investing in quality healthcare infrastructure is so important. We are going to be investing in this… and the private sector has to play a big role,” Adesina said.
Adesina called for “vaccine justice”, pointing out that so far, only one percent of the continent’s population had received delivery of vaccines – a key part of the continent’s health and economic response, as the African Economic Outlook report also points out.
The African Economic Outlook is the African Development Bank’s flagship annual publication. It provides economic data as well as analysis and recommendations for the continent’s economies. Each edition focuses on a contemporary theme.
The 2021 edition of the African Economic Outlook estimates that Africa’s GDP contracted 2.1 per cent in 2020, the continent’s first recession in half a century. GDP is projected to grow by 3.4 per cent in 2021.
Regarding debt, the report estimates that African governments need additional gross financing of about $154 billion in 2020/21 to respond to the Covid-19 crisis.
