COVID-19 and Conflict | Why virtual sex work hasn’t helped sex workers in India survive the COVID-19 lockdown

By ISS Blog Bliss 22 January 202118 January 2025 7022 views

Virtual sex work, although around for many years, has become an alternative to traditional sex work during the global COVID-19 pandemic. In India, like elsewhere, sex workers due to a strict lockdown and the limiting of their movements have turned to virtual sex work to earn a living. Yet it has not become a viable solution for many due to a number of challenges the workers face when resorting to this type of sex work, write Birendra Singh and Chitrakshi Vashisht.

“Sex workers” by mo’s is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By the end of 2020, around ten million people in India had been infected with COVID-19. Only the United States has recorded a higher number of infections. To mitigate the crisis, the Government of India instituted a lockdown, forcing its over 1.4 billion residents to stay at home. Among the many affected by strict lockdown measures are sex workers, who became a high-risk group during the pandemic due to the nature of their work that requires physical interaction.

Conservative estimates suggest that there are around 38,000 sex workers in the city of Delhi alone, of whom many are residential sex workers working from their small and congested houses (also the case for brothels). This poses a twofold challenge for them during the pandemic: a heightened individual risk of contracting a COVID-19 infection and lack of any other source of income to support themselves and their families in a time when the economy came to a virtual halt.

In light of this precarious situation, and as part of the ISS’s concluding ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’ (Discord) project, we conducted a small study with sex workers in Delhi, including with female sex workers (FSW – cisgender women), transgender (trans) women, and hijras (a socio-cultural group in India under the transgender umbrella which in 2014 was recognized as a third gender by the Supreme court of India). Interviews took place online in the summer of 2020, and we sought to understand the effects of the virus and the pandemic on their lives and the possibilities of new technological practices such as virtual sex for this group. We conducted six interviews: two with representatives of NGOs working with sex workers, two with representatives of the All India Network of Sex Workers, and two with representatives of the Mitr Trust. Of the respondents, three earn their living through sex work. Additionally, secondary data such as media reports, articles, and online interviews were consulted for the study.

Virtual sex work is emerging as a new typology of sex work whereby sex workers use electronic devices such as computers or (mobile) phones to provide sex services through text, audio, and video. Especially during the pandemic, a shift in sex-work practices from physical sex to virtual sex could be observed, while some claimed a potential transformation in sexuality in which virtual sex practices could have played a critical role. However, our study brings to light the critical factors associated with this practice itself that makes its feasibility as alternative livelihood for sex workers in Delhi questionable.

Challenges facing sex workers

The sex workers we spoke to belonged to the lower socio-economic tiers of society and were migrants. Most sex workers reside in congested, unauthorized housing clusters, slums, or small, rented rooms with their friends or families in Delhi. Often, men in families of FSWs suffer from alcoholism and drug abuse, while both FSWs and trans women face intimate partner violence. Due to the stigma attached to sex work and gender non-conformity (for trans women/and hijras), most are abandoned by their biological families. Amina’s story is no different. Now 19, she was thrown out by her parents when she was 16 years old. She particularly recalls: “My sister gave me 100 rupees (less than 2 euros) and asked me to buy poison and die.”

Many FSWs live dual/hidden lives, while some work as a domestic help, security guard, or in small manufacturing companies on outskirts of Delhi, using these additional jobs only as a ‘cover’ for their sex work. Trans women and/or hijras are marginalized even among FSWs since they are not considered ‘real’ women. Due to their gender/sexual expression, opportunities for decent work are often closed to them and they are forced to choose sex work, begging, and/or traditional hijra ways (singing and dancing at ritual functions) of living.

The use of virtual sex technology to keep working

A strict lockdown and fear of being infected halted sex work, with dire implications for sex workers. Some we spoke to stayed hungry for up to three days, while some FSWs lacked enough money to buy milk for their children. Hence, although not an entirely new option for some, virtual sex became the only option during the crisis. However, through it sex workers could earn only a small fraction of the income they could have earned through non-virtual sex work.

They faced many problems. To begin with, the lack of private space to interact when making audio or video calls was difficult for sex workers, as well as for their clients, because during the crisis everyone was staying at home. Especially poor and uneducated sex workers lacked the basic digital literacy to use the phone and/or the Internet, as well as the confidence and skills necessary to perform virtual sex work. Their socioeconomic background, precarious living conditions, and the stigmatization of sex work never allowed them to acquire these skills and pride in their work. Moreover, for some to meet the cost of an Internet connection or smartphone itself was impossible.

Safety in receiving payment by the clients was also among the big challenges that this community faced. Sharing phone numbers with strangers resulted in adverse consequences. Many men threatened sex workers, stating that if they did not provide them with a free service, they would ‘expose’ their identity to their neighbours and families. Additionally, many clients refused to pay in advance for the services. Many times, they would disconnect the call and block the sex worker’s account or phone number just after receiving the service virtually, while sometimes men would delay payment rather than denying it altogether and later block the number of the sex worker. Some clients also threatened to distribute their phone number to strangers who would make their life even more difficult. For most of the sex workers, the biggest problem with virtual sex was ‘no guarantee of payment’.

Not (yet) a viable alternative

Virtual sex as an innovative practice during the COVID-19 crisis didn’t work for the majority of the sex workers we interviewed because of the lack of digital literacy, access to good-quality phones or personal computers and Internet connections, privacy, and the empathy of society. Receiving safe and secure payment was also one of their biggest challenges. In the Indian context, virtual sex practices thus cannot be treated as a substitute for ‘regular’ sex work, although it has captured remarkable attention as a ‘new’ type of sex work.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors

Birendra Singh is a Science Technology and Society (STS) studies researcher. He holds a Master of Technology (M.Tech) and a research Master (M.Phil) in the realm of science policy. His research interest includes, frugal and grassroots innovation emerging from marginalized spaces, politics of knowledge and social institutions. At ISS/EUR, his PhD project is aspiring to conceptualize knowledge and learning dynamics of the bottom-up frugal innovations. For more info click here.

Chitrakshi Vashisht has over eight years of work experience in development sector in the field of gender, sexuality, education, adult literacy, SRH (particularly in HIV/AIDS) in India where she worked with several grassroots level NGOs/CBOs strenuously working for the rights of women, men and transgender (including but not limited to hijra and kothi) persons. Her research interests are in the areas of policy, gender, sexuality, identity, culture, and intimate partner violence. She holds an M.Sc. in Gender and Development Studies from Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, a Masters in Social Work from India and is presently pursuing her PhD from ISS.

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COVID-19 and Conflict | Economic downturn, precarity, and coping mechanisms in the Eastern DRC

By ISS Blog Bliss 20 January 202119 January 2025 4066 views

The Kivus in the Eastern DRC do not seem to be getting a break. Besides facing a protracted armed conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an economic downturn in the region as mining activities have been limited or shut down completely. In light of this intersection of crises, the region’s inhabitants have had to find ways to cope, defying lockdown measures in the process. Yet, the social ties of the region is what is keeping it alive, write Christo Gorpudolo and Claire Akello.

“TwangizaArticanalMiners” by USAID_IMAGES is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has faced a long period of protracted conflict, situated in a part of Africa that at one point in time has faced multiple conflicts or genocides, making the region highly volatile (Buscher, 2018: 194). The Kivu provinces in the Eastern DRC are facing a protracted armed conflict that has been widely reported on and has also been discussed on Bliss (see this article, this one, and this one).

As part of a research project hosted at ISS called ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict‘(Discord), we conducted a brief study of COVID-19 responses in the DRC, trying to find out what the responses were and how these were viewed and experienced on the ground. We conducted desk research and interviews with Congolese living and working in the Eastern DRC and the Kivus. We found that the intersection of the ongoing conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to great uncertainty in the region that people have sought to counter in their own ways.

Besides the prevailing economic situation as a result of violent conflict, the DRC has also experienced a new outbreak of communicable and highly infectious diseases, like its tenth Ebola outbreak in 2018, (see this WHO news article) as well as measles, yellow fever and, most recently, the outbreak of COVID-19, which occurred amidst the worst Ebola outbreak on the continent at the time (Mobula et al., 2020: 3). With the coinciding occurrence of COVID-19 and Ebola and an ongoing conflict, many Congolese families and miners feared the loss of their livelihoods and were at a greater risk of falling further into poverty due to dwindling incomes and severe health risks.

Following the recording of the first COVID-19 case (GARDAWORLD, 2020) on 10 March last year, on 24 March the DRC government announced a state of health emergency, declaring a nationwide lockdown to be observed in all of the country’s 11 provinces. Since then, the lockdown has been extended five times by the national assembly, with various forms of preventive measures introduced (Atlantic Council, 2020). The lockdown measures have immensely affected mining activities in the DRC (IPIS, 2020) a country where residents rely heavily on income from the mining sector. According to a report by the European Network for Central Africa (EurAc), insecurity in the mineral supply chain due to the outbreak of COVID-19 has had an impact on the Congolese economy in general, with the country preparing for a potential catastrophic economic downturn in the mining sector (Business and Human Rights Resource Center, 2020).

Mining activities in the Kivus and the Eastern DRC are conducted in person, with a strong reliance on human or person-to-person interaction. Thus, with the introduction of preventive measures, the livelihoods of miners and people living in Eastern DRC have been negatively impacted, as these preventive measures according to respondents run contrary to the somewhat informal practices in the DRC, particularly in the mining sector. Some prevention measures introduced by the government included the prevention of the movement of people, the closing of borders, and the limitation of legal mining activities, which forced small-scale miners to cease their operations that provided them with incomes necessary to survive.

One of the respondents participating in the research stated that with no definite time of earliest recovery in the mining sector, there is increasing anxiety and fear amongst miners and people living in the Kivus of little chance of a swift economic recovery as the situation moves from a short-term health crisis to a prolonged economic downturn.

In the Kivus, some areas such as Biholo, Nalucho and Kalehe have suspended mining activities, while in other sites artisanal miners continue to work amidst strict guidelines and awareness campaigns about the containment of COVID-19 by different civil society organizations. However, the situation is far from ideal. It was also highlighted by respondents that the closure of mining activities affects the wider population in the Kivus because many people rely on the income from the mines.

Defying lockdown measures to counter anxiety

These economic impacts have caused distress among families, miners, and people living in the Kivus. As a coping mechanism, the population in the Kivus find social gatherings important (although these gathering are not permitted) as a form of mental support. According to four of the six respondents interviewed for this study, families and residents living in Eastern DRC and the Kivus meet in what they referred to as ‘secret bars’ operating undercover. These bars usually appear closed or isolated from the outside, but are booming inside. Respondents also stated that most of the friends/or families meeting inside these ‘secret bars’ have a mutual agreement, as these gathering places remain secret to those outside the trust circles. These gatherings involve the sharing of drinks and friendly conversation. It is considered a way to handle anxiety that comes with uncertain times, including the current state of the Congolese economy.

A major risk factor posed by this form of coping mechanism is that it makes the population more vulnerable to COVID-19 and increases the risk of widespread COVID-19 transmission due to increased social interaction. Yet people felt that they had to defy lockdown measures to cope and were willing to take the risk. Consequently, social gatherings still take place, serving an important function in a time of economic precarity and great uncertainty. This form of coping may be the lifeline for many in the Eastern DRC and elsewhere, and its value should not go unrecognized.

References

Atlantic Council. 2020. “Shaping the global future together.” Accessed 25 July 2020 https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/

Büscher, K., 2018. “African cities and violent conflict: the urban dimension of conflict and post conflict dynamics in Central and Eastern Africa.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 12 (2): 193-210.

Business and Human Rights Resource Center. 2020. “Mining minister warns against the social and economic impact of mine closure during the COVID-19 pandemic.” https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/drc-mining-minister-warns-against-the-social-and-economic-impact-of-mine-closures-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/

GARDAWORLD. 2020. “DRC: authorities declare state of emergency March 24/3.” https://www.garda.com/crisis24/news-alerts/326271/drc-authorities-declare-state-of-emergency-march-24-update-3

IPIS. 2020. “The impact of COVID-19 on the artisanal mining sector in Eastern DRC.” https://ipisresearch.be/publication/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-the-artisanal-mining-sector-in-eastern-drc/

World Bank. 2020. “World Population: DRC.” Accessed on 16 June 2020 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=CG-CD

Mobula, L. M., H. Samaha, M. Yao, A. S. Gueye, B. Diallo, C. Umutoni, J. Anoko, J. P. Lokonga, L. Minikulu, M. Mossoko, and E. Bruni, 2020. “Mobilizing the COVID-19 response in the DRC.” Accessed on 23 June 2020 https://www.path.org/articles/mobilizing-covid-19-response-drc/

About the authors:

Christo Gorpudolo is a development practitioner who has been working in the development sector since 2014. She is an early career researcher with an academic interest in topics including humanitarian aid, gender, peace, and conflict. She has a Master’s of Arts Degree in Development Studies from the ISS.

Claire Akello graduated from the ISS in 2019 with a major in Human Rights, Gender and Conflict studies. She has been engaged in both media and development work for local and international organizations for over five years, focusing on issues related to health, education, and access to justice.

COVID-19 and Conflict | Between myth and mistrust: the role of interlocutors in managing COVID-19 in Haiti

By ISS Blog Bliss 11 January 202119 January 2025 3629 views

Mistrust in state-provided information about COVID-19 has characterized citizen responses to the pandemic in Haiti, preventing the effective management of the virus. This article shows that this mistrust is rooted in a number of historical, political, and social factors, including the perceived mismanagement of past crises. In the wake of resistance to pandemic measures and failure to adhere to regulations, local organizations can play an important role in contexts with low institutional trustworthiness.

To date, Haiti has managed to register a relatively low number of COVID-19 infections and related deaths. Initial concerns regarding the potential devastation COVID-19 could cause in Haiti were related to insufficient sanitary standards and medical facilities necessary to prevent the spread of the virus and ensure the proper treatment of infected patients. However, it turned out that the misunderstanding of COVID-19-related information was another major challenge that prevented people from taking preventative measures and going to hospital when infected.

Some studies conducted during the cholera outbreak in 2010 have pointed out that extreme poverty and low levels of education can cause mistrust in information on health instructions (Cénat, 2020). Nevertheless, these narrow explanations disregard the historical and socio-political background that has nurtured the mistrust of the population in public institutions that is also visible in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Local organizations have played a central role in addressing the Haitian community’s disbeliefs around COVID-19, stepping in as interlocutors in the fight against the spread of the virus.

Over the past few years, discontent with the performance of the state has led to extensive protests. On many occasions, people have called for the resignation of the president and the dissolution of the government, denouncing its inability to manage past crises, claiming a lack of accountability, and citing worsening inequality. Furthermore, the community’s anger has been extended to international institutions, particularly the Core Group[i], the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH). They are blamed for intervening in Haiti’s internal politics and supporting the current regime, thus keeping the president from resigning (AFP, 2019).

Such anger at, and mistrust in, people in power has been constructed historically. The importation of cholera to Haiti by a UN agent in 2010 as well as successive governments’ mismanagement of the consequent outbreak, the lack of accountability for and the dissatisfaction with the 2010 earthquake responses, the exposure of PetroCaribe fund-related corruption, and the widely reported sexual abuse scandal are just some of the cases that have led to widespread mistrust of those in power.

Damage already done?

When the first COVID-19 infection was confirmed, the government immediately declared a health emergency, imposing restrictive measures and undertaking information campaigns to raise awareness of the pandemic and the necessary sanitary measures to be taken through broadcasts on television, radio, and social media, or by means of vehicles circulating in suburbs with speakers mounted on their roofs[ii]. Despite these efforts, due to the general mistrust and lack of legitimacy of the current government, not only protests against ‘lockdown’ measures and the refusal to adhere to them, but also disbelief surrounding the disease led to the spread of rumours and misinformation (See also Dorcela and St. Jean, 2020). “People think of COVID-19 as a political matter”, said a head of a local youth group.

Hearsay varied from the government having invented the virus to receive money from international aid agencies or diverting attention from the internal political issues[iii] to the hospitals testing a new vaccine on the Haitian population. The disbeliefs were such that people ended up claiming that those showing the same symptoms of COVID-19 were not infected by the virus, but with a different disease that they called ‘Ti lafyèv’ (‘small fever’)[iv], which was assumed to be easily treatable with ‘te anmè’ (bitter tea), therefore ensuring that hospital visits (and testing) were ‘not necessary’.

Given the misinformation, on the one hand people have not taken the virus seriously and therefore failed to follow preventative measures, while on the other hand panic was created and people stigmatized, which prevented them from going to the doctor and accelerated the spread of the virus. Additionally, some acts of sabotage of medical services were reported.

Countering disbelief, panic, and stigma, some local leaders and organizations took important initiatives to disseminate correct information and to help the communities cope with the government measures. For example, Doctors Without Borders and Gheskio, a leading Haitian healthcare institution, trained volunteers as field officers to spread information about the virus by visiting people (what it is, how to protect oneself, which hospitals to go to, etc.). In this regard, Dr. Pape, a founder of Gheskio, argued that “poor people are not stupid. [They] want to make sure that what you’re telling them is real.”[v]

Other civil society organizations (CSOs) also took various initiatives to communicate with people. While some initiatives used campaign music or held quiz contests with questions about COVID-19, allowing participants to learn about the virus while having fun, others visited street vendors and residents, going door to door with information leaflets to clear up the misunderstanding, to remind people that the virus is still present, and to ask them to wear face masks and wash their hands even if others do not follow the measures. Also, the CSO Ekoloji pou Ayiti established hand-washing stations in Furcy and its members stood at the stations to explain to the users which precautions and preventative measures to take, as well as how to make homemade sanitizer.

Thus, in places where the legitimacy and credibility of the government is disputed, such as Haiti, interlocutors such as CSOs and other local organizations can significantly contribute to effective crisis management. The above examples once again highlight the vital role of local actors in articulating and ‘narrowing down’ key messages and practices among the population that are central in managing the spread and effects of the virus.

References

AFP (2019) “Haïti: l’opposition manifeste contre « l’ingérence internationale » (Haiti: the opposition manifestes against the « international interference »”. Available at: https://5minutes.rtl.lu/actu/monde/a/1413480.html (Accessed: 14 December 2020).

Cénat, J. M. (2020) “The Vulnerability of Low-and Middle-Income Countries Facing the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Haiti”, in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease 37 (101684). Doi: 10.1016/j.tmaid.2020.101684

Dorcela, S. and St. Jean, M. (2020) “Covid-19: Haiti is Vulnerable, but the International Community Can Help”. Available at: https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/224836/coronavirus-updates/covid-19-haiti-vulnerable-international-community-can (Accessed: 19 July 2020).

Footnotes

[i] Refers to a diplomatic group composed of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative, the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, the EU, France, Germany, Spain, the US, and the OAS.

[ii] Telephonic conversation with a physician in Port-au-Prince on 4 July 2020 and with a health professional in Les Cayes on 20 July 2020.

[iii] Telephonic conversation with a physician in Port-au-Prince on 4 July 2020.

[iv] Telephonic conversation with a health professional in Les Cayes on 20 July 2020.

[v] See Feliciano, I. and Kargbo, C. (2020) “As COVID cases surge, Haiti’s Dr. Pape is on the frontline again”.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]This article is an outcome of research conducted by the authors between June and August 2020 as part of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam’s ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’ project. The research aimed to analyze the tensions between top-down measures implemented to face the COVID-19 emergency and the bottom-up responses and mechanisms seen among local leaders and institutions in Haiti. Methodologically, it was conducted by doing a secondary sources review and remote interviews with a number of Haitian health professionals.

About the authors:

Angela Sabogal is a sociologist who graduated from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. She is currently finishing an MA degree in Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies ISS of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has six years of working experience in social project management in Colombia and Haiti.

Yuki Fujita is MA degree student in Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her major at the ISS is the Social Policy for Development. Before coming to the ISS, she worked in the diplomatic corps in Haiti for two years from 2017 to 2019.

COVID-19 | The voices of children and youth in Tanzania’s COVID-19 response

By ISS Blog Bliss 31 December 202019 January 2025 2819 views

Rapid research into the effects of COVID-19 on young people in Tanzania reveals high levels of anxiety about the virus as it relates to relationships, economic livelihoods and the community. The research, led by Dr Elizabeth Ngutuku, draws further attention to the need for governments to consider the disease’s wider social and psychological impacts.

Soon after the first COVID-19 case was reported in Tanzania on 16 March 2020, a series of closures were announced to schools and some businesses to avert the spread of the disease. However, the government changed tack in June, announcing the country had the disease under control. Life seemed to have gone back to the normal with schools re-opening and people returning to work.

In July and August 2020, as part of our advocacy using the findings from our research, ‘Adolescent’s Perceptions of Healthy Relationships in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam’, we carried out rapid research with children and youth aged 10-18 years through essay writing. The resulting 309 essays explored young people’s perspectives on the effects of COVID-19 on their relationships with others at home, their school, the community, technology and with the environment. Their narratives reveal that behind the sense of assumed normality, and assurance that the virus does not pose a threat to the general population, the youth position themselves ambivalently. While their voice on effects of the disease speaks to day-to-day immediate issues of survival, it also jumps scales to touch on relationships between nation states, relations with the government and a relationship with the country’s past.

The disease is ‘everywhere’

Young people noted that the disease permeated all areas of their relationships and equated this to being ‘everywhere and in everything’. Arguing that space itself was ‘sick’, this understanding can be read literally from President Magufuli’s declaration that the disease inhabits inanimate objects, like papaya and even animals such as goats. These voices reveal deeper perspectives when read alongside young people’s relationship with the environment, especially play spaces, trees, rocks and beaches, as shown to be important to youth in our earlier work in Mwanza and Dar es Salaam. Through art-based research and interviews, some of the young respondents explained that when relationships with their parents and siblings soured, they would go out to relax in these spaces or talk to animals.

Such a souring of family relationships was common during the period of school closures. While some acquired new skills like cooking, and bonded with their parents at home, others reported being overworked and the pressure causing constant collisions. Some young people noted that during such periods school normally provided solace through interactions with peers and teachers. Some girls were also looking forward to schools’ re-opening to avoid domestic sexual violence, as reported elsewhere to be on the rise in Tanzania during the epidemic, but other girls explained that staying at home had freed them from being approached for sexual favours by their peers and teachers.

Many young respondents voiced a perceived weakening of social ties, beyond immediate practices such as an inability to hug or greet each other, and playing or receiving visitors. They drew attention to the effects on a core social fabric and collective support. These young respondents remembered a collective past (perhaps drawing on the imaginaries of Ujamaa philosophy), with its emphasis on the care and welfare for others, in contrast to, for example, people during the epidemic who stopped carrying each other’s burdens, or what they called kubebeana mzigo. Drawing on a collective we, many respondents also noted that society’s collective dreams or aspirations (ndoto zetu) had been put on hold, which while going unspecified allude to school closures and an ability to continue their activities in the community.

Economics and politics matters to youth

The youth respondents emphasised the epidemic’s large and small economic effects. While they discussed their parents having lost jobs and livelihoods, and the inability to afford health care, they raised anxieties over there being ‘no longer milk for the small baby [sibling]’ and not being able to ‘ask for a second helping of food’, as they did before onset of the disease.

Moreover, the youth positioned themselves as actors in political relationships. For example, when referencing the diplomatic spat between Kenya and Tanzania over flights and truck drivers, they stated the disease had created enmity between countries, interpreting the closure of the shared border as an attempt by Kenya, which they called a good neighbour, to close itself off from Tanzania. Some noted that their relatives, and especially their breadwinner fathers who rely on cross-border trade, were afraid they would be quarantined in Kenya at their own expense, leaving them behind as carers for the family. This requirement was only reviewed in mid-September 2020.

Despite the atmosphere of the gloom, many young people also celebrated the President like a prophet who supported them with ‘kind words’, assuring them that ‘God could not allow them to die of Corona’. These youth represented themselves as political and cultural nationalists, who unquestioningly obeyed the President’s traditional steam therapy for the virus, as well as his call for the country’s return to faith, health, community and nation through prayer. For others, an obedience to Magufuli’s orders was more guarded, with some youth revealing how their parents forbade them to go to church, despite the leadership urging their attendance.

The youth indeed represented collective prayer in Kiswahili as praying bega kwa bega (shoulder to shoulder) against the disease, for which prevention is alternatively encouraged by the World Health Organization through maintaining social distance. The respondents further represented the perceived elimination of COVID-19 as a sign of good leadership by the government, because cases in Tanzania (which stopped publishing statistics in May 2020) were few compared to the high COVID-19 statistics in Kenya by June.

Listening to youth voices differently through essay writing reveals that behind the façade of a fearless nation fear remains prevalent. Our respondents reported that important political leaders in the community had died of the disease, and their essays revealed a veritable daily fear of their parents’ death. Some reported that they would observe their parents for signs of infection after they returned from work, and one youth in Dar es Salaam noted that he would each day observe his friends throwing a bottle of hand sanitiser to their mother on arrival.

Yet many children nevertheless celebrated their president, the sentiment ‘our president cannot lie to us, we cannot die of Corona’ expressed by many respondents, which can be read as cautiously confident despite their anxiety. It is at the interstices of this apparent guarded optimism that an imperative emerges for the government of Tanzania: they must listen to the wishes and voices of young people and protect them not only from the disease but its multitude of effects.

This post was first published by the LSE’s Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and first appeared here

About the author:

Elizabeth Ngutuku has a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work investigates young people’s experience of poverty, vulnerability, citizenship claims and sexual and reproductive health. Dr. Ngutuku coordinated the rapid research on behalf of Nascent/ISS as part of the APHR project funded by Oak Foundation

COVID-19 and Conflict | Pandemic responses in Brazil’s favelas and beyond: making the invisible visible

By ISS Blog Bliss 22 December 202019 January 2025 3740 views

The inaction of the Brazilian government during the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed some members of Brazilian society into an even more vulnerable position. Yet many of these groups seem to know what they need to do to fight the virus. Here, we highlight the capacity of some domestic workers and residents of favelas to organize both quickly and innovatively during the pandemic. Importantly, we show that favelas can be a site for empowering transformation, rather than just a place of misfortune.

“I watched a report on the TV. They were interviewing an upper-middle class family about the lockdown. But the domestic worker could be seen in the background, working. “Oh, this family is isolated”. But what about that worker back there? Isn’t she someone?” (Cleide Pinto, from FENATRAD, domestic workers union).

Sharing videos of life in quarantine has become a commonplace during the pandemic in Brazil. Television personalities have provided a glimpse of their lives at home, showing what it has been like for them to be in quarantine. Yet, staying home in Brazil is a privilege and not possible for more than 50 million Brazilians[i]. Although a large part of the population is dependent on informal jobs and must continue to leave their houses every day, they are virtually invisible—to most.

This scenario is just another reflection of the abysmal inequality where the richest 10% hold 41.9% of the country’s total income^[ii]. In the labour market—where around 36% of employed people work under informal conditions—domestic workers number approximately 7 million^[iii]. Despite these numbers, their jobs remain precarious—domestic work was finally recognized as formal work in 2015[1], but most of domestic workers still do not have formal contracts.

To aggravate this state of affairs, during the pandemic domestic work was declared an ‘essential service’ in several states of Brazil[2], forcing a large number of women to continue working and having to risk being infected whilst taking public transport or whilst toiling in the households of the elites. In cases where employers allowed them not to work for their own safety, many were also not paid or feared losing their jobs.

Crowded BRT by the reopening of commerce in Rio de Janeiro during the pandemic, on June 9th, 2020. Image: Yan Marcelo / @ yanzitx. Authorized by authors.

However, Brazilian civil society was organized and often vocal, playing an active and central role in the fight against COVID-19[3]. Collaborative initiatives based in solidarity emerged in various settings to provide temporary support for those in need. Civil society used existing networks and infrastructure of support, but was also innovative in its actions, forging new and strengthening existing solidarity networks. The trigger was the knowledge that the state was not going to see them, nor take care of them. On top of that, many of these workers, including domestic workers, live in communities with poor socioeconomic conditions, often known as favelas (informal settlements).

As a response to the pandemic, the national association of domestic workers (FENATRAD) organized national campaigns, such as the Cuida de quem te cuida (‘care for those who care’)[iv] to pressure public institutions not to consider domestic work as essential during the pandemic and to encourage employers to put workers on paid leave. FENATRAD published videos on social networks to raise awareness and promote other forms of support, such as gaining access to the online platform for the federal government’s emergency fund. Such organization played a crucial role in informing workers about their rights, particularly how to protect themselves.

Leaders from within the favelas took charge, organizing online fundraising campaigns and the distribution of primary goods. The Favela of Paraisópolis, situated next to a rich neighbourhood in São Paulo, made it to the Dutch news as an example of a community that managed to fight COVID-19 using its own means. Vital to this success has been a partnership with the network ‘G10 das Favelas’[v], an organization that supports entrepreneurship within different communities across the country. Their lemma is based on the idea of favelas as a place for empowering transformation rather than a place of misfortune, according to Gilson Rodrigues, a community leader in Paraisópolis.

Through the partnership, civil society created the idea of ‘presidents of the street’, employing 542 volunteers as ‘street presidents’ responsible for distributing food and hygiene products in their allocated areas. A further deficiency in social assistance is that of SAMU, public service for ambulance urgencies, as noted below:

“SAMU does not get to Paraisópolis. It did not do so even before the pandemic, even less so now” (Gilson Rodrigues).

As many public services were not available, they trained 240 first aid brigades within the community, hired private ambulances and medical staff, and organized information campaigns on hygiene procedures and on how to recognize symptoms of the disease.

Two schools in the neighbourhood were transformed into centres to host those who tested positive for the virus, allowing them to be in isolation, with food, a TV room, and a proper space in which to recover. To support domestic workers of the community, they created the program ‘Adote uma diarista’ (‘adopt a domestic worker’), providing financial resources, hygiene material, and/or food for more than one thousand informal workers.

These examples show an exceptional response from civil society in Paraisópolis[4]. However, not all favelas have the same level of organization. Although these initiatives temporarily alleviated the burden of the pandemic for the people in these communities, they do not offer structural solutions for their situation. Domestic workers unexpectedly became frontline workers. An optimistic future would be to imagine that these initiatives would result in greater recognition of domestic work and greater empowerment and rights for the people in these communities. However, with the present political scenario, this future is hard to imagine.

[1] http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2015/06/dilma-assina-regulamentacao-dos-direitos-das-domesticas-diz-planalto.html

[2] Governments of the states of Pará, Maranhão, Rio Grande do Sul and Ceará are among some of the states in which domestic work was declared as essential during the pandemic.

[3] This is the second out of three posts to be published on Bliss presenting the main findings of the research work about COVID-19 in Brazil for the project ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’. We performed desk research and a qualitative comparative analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with members of three civil society groups in Brazil: residents of favelas (informal settlements), domestic workers, and indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Interviews took place in July 2020, at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in Brazil.

[4] For more info, please see: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2020/04/07/paraisopolis-se-une-contra-o-coronavirus-contrata-ambulancias-medicos-e-distribui-mais-de-mil-marmitas-por-dia.ghtml and https://newsus.cgtn.com/news/2020-04-19/Favela-fights-coronavirus-PNzcVTweKk/index.html

[i] IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. Síntese de Indicadores Sociais 2017.

[ii] https://cee.fiocruz.br/?q=node/1090

[iii] According to FENATRAD.

[iv] The campaign Cuida de quem te cuida (Care for those who take care of you) is an attempt to pressure the Public Ministry to forbid states from filing decrees declaring domestic work as essential work. Despite the campaign, the decrees continued to happen and with the reopening of the economy, it became even hard to implement a monitoring system that would guarantee a safe work condition for these women.

[v] http://www.g10favelas.org

About the authors:

Fiorella Macchiavello is an economist and holds an MA degree in Urban and Regional Development from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. Currently, she is a PhD researcher in the third year of a Joint Degree between the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam and UnB, University of Brasilia, Brazil.

Renata Cavalcanti Muniz is a full time PhD researcher at ISS in the last year of her research. Her PhD research was funded by CNPQ-Brasil, and she is part of two research groups at ISS, DEC and CI.

Lee Pegler spent his early career working as an economist with the Australian Labour Movement. More recent times have seen him researching the labour implications of “new” management strategies of TNCs in Brazil/ Latin America. This interest expanded to a focus on the implications of value chain insertion on labour, both for formal and informal workers. Trained as an economist and sociologist (PhD – LSE), he currently works as Assistant Professor (Work, Organisation and Labour Rights) at the ISS.

COVID-19 and Conflict | The state’s failure to respond to COVID-19 in Brazil: an intentional disaster

By ISS Blog Bliss 16 December 202019 January 2025 4371 views

The COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil stretches beyond the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The inaction of the government over the past year to counter the effects of the pandemic has worsened living conditions for millions of Brazilians and ultimately resulted in the loss of lives. We argue that the intentional disaster resulting from the mismanagement of the pandemic was caused by the direct (in)action of the federal government as gross negligence rooted in apathy clashed with historically constructed conditions.

“The famous ‘stay home’ idea does not work for us here; it is not our reality […] quarantine in the favelas is the biggest fake news invented.” (Gilson Rodrigues, communitarian leader)

“The domestic worker already has a lot against her. If the boss gets sick, he uses his private healthcare system and is treated and cured. Domestic workers use the public system, stand in a large queue, and most of them die. This is the case not only for the domestic worker, but for all poor workers.” (Cleide Pinto, domestic workers union)

The above quotes provide just a glimpse of life during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, painting a picture of gross negligence, mismanagement, and death. These stories are not exceptions. Millions of Brazilians have had to navigate the pandemic, suffering as much from the inaction of the federal government as they did in fighting the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The pandemic became a crisis as the virus entered the country via elites and as existing inequities were compounded as the government stalled. The failure to act to save lives through imposing crucial pandemic measures is why we call it an intentional disaster.

To understand how this intentional disaster came to pass, we performed desk research and a qualitative comparative analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews[1] conducted with members of three civil society groups in Brazil: residents of favelas (informal settlements), domestic workers, and indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Interviews took place in July 2020, at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in Brazil. The struggles of the three groups to survive the pandemic represent an ongoing fight, but also show their capacity to be organized, innovative, and quick in resistance. The common threat to the studied groups, besides the virus, was and remains the inaction of the government.

Inequalities in Brazilian society were dramatically exposed by the posture of president Jair Bolsonaro, who relativized deaths and disregarded the importance of the disease by claiming it was “just a simple flu”. Bolsonaro’s government attempted to obscure the official number of lives lost to COVID-19[2] and created obstacles for governors and mayors who felt compelled to implement measures to fight the virus[3]. Initially, governors rejected the directions of the president and implemented lockdown measures. It came to a point where the Supreme Court had to intervene, clarifying that the governors indeed had the responsibility to intervene and were permitted to do so. This provided a shimmer of hope in the face of the absence of larger, national measures.

Moreover, after the resignation of the Minister of Health in May this year, no other minister has been proclaimed; the ministry has since been run by a military general. It is notable that the country is facing the worst pandemic in a century without an official health minister. A lack of leadership, lack of planning, and lack of care for the dying population became the norm.

The devastation this level of inaction caused should not go unnoticed. The number of deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil surpassed 175,000 by beginning December – as a country of continental numbers, Brazil is now the third country in the world in terms of numbers of lives lost to the virus and confirmed cases. Similar to the US, a populist government openly denied scientific findings showing that COVID-19 was real and potentially lethal. A difference between the two countries, however, is that in the United States, Donald Trump eventually realized the need to take measures to contain the pandemic (even if due to electoral motivations). In Brazil, Bolsonaro seems to continue to ignore that responsibility.

What can now be witnessed is that Bolsonaro did not seem to learn, with all the lives lost, nor with Trump’s defeat, how crucial the imposition of measures are. The president continues to appear in pictures without wearing a mask and without adhering to social distancing measures. He now behaves as if the pandemic was over, plans to cut the emergency cash support to the population, and incites the population not to trust a vaccine originating from China. The year has gone from bad to worse.

Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro: protest in remembrance of 100,000 lives lost to the new coronavirus during the first weeks of August 2020, when the country hit the second place in the number of lives lost to COVID-19.
Picture: Rio da Paz. Authorized by authors.

How is this failure to act felt on the ground? What studies revealed in the Brazilian case is that a virus that arrived through elites when returning from vacation in Europe had a bigger impact in the most vulnerable spaces. People on the peripheries, residents of favelas, informal workers, the black population, and indigenous groups are hit hardest. The highest number of deaths seems also to be among the poorest. In a study of infections in São Paulo, almost 66% of the victims lived in neighbourhoods with average salaries of below R$3,000 reais (around 200 euros) per month, and 21% in places with an income of up to R$6,500 reais (around 1.000 euros) per month. Within regions where the average income was above R$19,000 (around 3,167 euros) per month, only just over 1% of deaths were registered.

This pattern found in São Paulo is likely to be repeated in other parts of the country. Populations with a higher socioeconomic status are those who can afford to be in isolation or lockdown and can work from home. A large part of the population cannot afford to do that. In the State of Rio de Janeiro, the first death due to COVID-19 was of a black domestic worker infected in the house where she worked after her employers had returned from a trip to Italy and were tested positive. COVID-19 in Brazil brings to the fore historic inequalities that follow the country’s development. Additionally, these inequalities are aggravated by an intentional policy of negligence by the federal government.

The failure of the Brazilian government to deal with the pandemic seems to be a combination of: (1) the obscure discourse of the president; (2) the lack of specific policies and proper communication with different groups; (3) the cover-up of official information, especially regarding the number of deaths; (4) the deliberate weakening of public services by the current government; and (5) a lack of strategy and planning. In summary, it is an act of complete neglect by the federal government, which in times of pandemic can be perceived as an intentional strategy to decimate the population, especially the most vulnerable, which is known in the literature as necropolitics[4].

In the words of indigenous leader Anderson Tapuia,

“here in Brazil we have a government that sends the message that if corona arrives at the villages, it should continue there, doing its work, which means exterminating indigenous peoples”.

[1] This is the first out of three posts to be published on Bliss presenting the main findings of the research work about COVID-19 in Brazil for the project ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’.

[2] https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/06/08/veiculos-de-comunicacao-formam-parceria-para-dar-transparencia-a-dados-de-covid-19.ghtml

[3] https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/06/08/veiculos-de-comunicacao-formam-parceria-para-dar-transparencia-a-dados-de-covid-19.ghtml

[4] Necropolitics is a process in which the state uses political power – by its discourses, actions and omissions – to put specific groups into a more marginalised and vulnerable position (Mbembe, 2019).

References:

MBEMBE, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, London : Duke University Press.

About the authors:

The rise of Big Tech cements the fall of the US economy

By ISS Blog Bliss 1 December 202019 January 2025 4341 views

While the US economy is going through its worst crisis in the last eight decades, with small businesses shutting down en masse and millions of Americans losing their jobs, one wouldn’t know anything is wrong solely from looking at the largest US companies. The crisis, triggered―but not caused―by the COVID-19 pandemic measures, has enabled some of the world’s largest corporations to amass record profits. It allows them to capture ever-larger shares of a market that is increasingly monopolised. How could that happen and what will it lead to?

The widening gap between the Big Five and the rest

It is no secret that Amazon has done well throughout the pandemic, with both the company’s profits and Jeff Bezos’ personal wealth shooting up to record highs in the middle of one of the worst recessions the US has ever seen. While brick-and-mortar retailers have suffered tremendous damage as a result of the measures implemented in response to COVID-19, Amazon has thrived off the accelerated shift to online services.

And it is not alone in this: The so-called US tech companies―also referred to as the Big Five―have all managed to keep increasing their profits while the US economy is contracting. Apple, Alphabet (Google’s holding company), Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft saw their combined pre-tax profits rise by an annualised 5% in the second quarter; starkly contrasting profits of the rest of corporate America, which fell by an annualised 27% (excluding finance).

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A company experiencing profits growth during a recession is highly unusual, and the Big Five’s outperformance has led to a dramatic increase of their share in total non-financial profits made by US companies. Having already risen from 4% in 2011 to 11% in 2019, the Big Five have increased their slice of the pie to 16% in the first half of this year.

To put this into perspective: The concentration of US non-financial profits in the top five companies has historically been around 7-9% while the current top five, which includes three of the large tech companies, accounted for an astounding 19.3% in 2019. Since the onset of the pandemic, this figure is estimated to have risen further to 25%. This would mean that five companies now receive one quarter of all non-financial profits made in the US.

[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”18704″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]A long-standing trend of market concentration

There is no question that the pandemic measures have accelerated the ever-widening gap between the Big Five and the rest, but at the same time it cannot be ignored that the US economy has seen a long-standing trend of market and profits concentration. Even before Big Tech came along, many of the major industries, ranging from beer to healthcare, had already seen the emergence of oligopolies (a few dominant firms), duopolies (two dominant firms) and even monopolies (one dominant firm).

A prime example is the case of high-speed internet provision in the US, for which the market is almost completely controlled by the three telecom giants AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. By carving up the market, they have avoided competing in the same regions, forcing as many as 75% of US households to ‘choose’ from just one provider. Health insurance is another industry for which the market has been sliced up by the companies who dominate it, ensuring that competition is avoided as much as possible. As a consequence, in many states 80-90% of the health insurance market is controlled by just two companies.

Capitalism is a system in which competition drives innovation and growth. The natural strategy for a company to become dominant in an industry is to outcompete its rivals by producing better and cheaper products―i.e., by innovating. The problem in the US today is that more often than not, it has been a lack of competition which has allowed for high levels of market concentration and abnormally high profit margins in the US.

But it wasn’t always like this. The US government used to pay great attention to market concentration and threats to competition, which was why they had created antitrust regulation in the first place around the turn of the 20^th century. According to Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, who documented the vast extent of uncompetitive and increasingly concentrated industries in the US in ‘The Myth of Capitalism’, point to the dismantling of antitrust regulation since the 1980s as one of the major causes for the growing degree of what they refer to as ‘industrial concentration’.

An illustration of when antitrust was still applied in full force is the case of IBM in 1969. The US government brought an antitrust lawsuit to PC maker IBM who held 70% of the market at the time. The lawsuit instigated IBM to make its hardware compatible with software other than the programmes it sold itself, allowing for new companies such as Microsoft (founded in 1975) to emerge and produce software for IBM machines and, eventually, for those produced by other companies.

In 1998, when the number of antitrust cases was already much lower than before, the US government brought an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft because it was starting to monopolise the PC software market. The tech giant was using its popular Windows operating system to favour its own programs such as the Internet Explorer. And with the internet on the rise, the company was also well positioned to block competitors from areas such as search engines. The lawsuit helped curb Microsoft’s growing power and allow other software companies to compete. Perhaps more importantly, it also allowed tech startups―such as a little company called Google―to grow.

The Big Five and the abandonment of antitrust regulation

The irony of Google owing its existence to antitrust is that the tech giant is currently one of the largest violators of antitrust principles, which appear to no longer be enforced by the US government. Apart from being a monopoly in the market for search engines, Google together with Facebook controls the market for online advertising with both companies actively barring new entrants to the industry. When Facebook bought social media rival Instagram in 2012, there was not a single antitrust case brought against them to block the acquisition.

Buying the competition certainly has been a favorite tool for retaining dominance. Since 2005, the Big Five have acquired 549 companies, which in many instances were direct competitors. From 1985 to 2017, the number of mergers and acquisitions completed annually rose from 2,308 to 15,361 nationwide. Unsurprisingly, Tepper and Hearn are able to show that the rise in acquisitions has a clear inverse relationship with the number of antitrust cases.

On top of acquisitions, the Big Five have found other ways to cement their market dominance. As US President Donald Trump correctly pointed out, Amazon is subsidised massively by their exclusive access to state-owned US postal services (USPS) at cheap rates. It is estimated that the USPS undercharges Amazon by $1.47 per package―no wonder Amazon accounts for more than 43% of online retail sales.

Boosting profits without being more competitive

Highly concentrated industries allow for two major distortions that boost corporate profits without the dominant companies having to be more competitive: price gouging and suppressing wages.

For price gouging, the internet provision industry serves as a good example. New York University economist Thomas Philippon found in a 2019 study that prices for a monthly broadband connection were almost twice as high in the US than in Europe or South Korea. Similar price differences were observed for air travel in the US when compared to Europe. Flights in the US are dominated by four major airlines that often enjoy regional monopolies and have solidified their market dominance since the US deregulated the airline industry in 1978. Having been fairly stable until that point, inflation-adjusted flight prices jumped by 50% in the first ten years after deregulation.

Being often one of the few employers (in some cases the only employer) in small-town America, monopolies also hold significant power over labour, which they exert through lobbying for laxer labour laws, inserting non-compete clauses in labour contracts, and consequently depressing wages. Marshall Steinbaum, Ioana Marinescu and Jose Azar found that wages are typically 10-25% lower in a ‘highly concentrated’ industry than in a ‘very competitive one’. Overall, wages adjusted for inflation have been stagnant in the US since the 1970s.

The suppression of wages has no doubt elevated profits margins, as Tepper and Hearn show in an almost perfectly inverse relationship between the two. What they further show is that the income distribution to the lower percentiles has a remarkably close correlation to union membership, the latter of which has been on a steady decline since the 1960s, implying that the large US corporations have successfully worn down the power of labour.

The consequences of not having to compete

Higher prices and lower wages are the reason for the exorbitant profit margins we see in today’s economy. But apart from that, they also lead to a complete loss of the capitalist drive that usually spurs companies to innovate. This decline in innovation is for a large part indicated by the number of US-American start-ups―which usually account for a large portion of total innovation―having fallen by nearly half since the 1970s.

What’s more, the large companies that dominate their industries are themselves not driven to innovate anymore. Instead, they have found a new way to inflate the value of their company: share buybacks. A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review found that between 2009-2018, companies listed on the S&P500 spent $4.3 trillion, or 52% of net income (profits), on share buybacks and $3.3 trillion, or 39% of net income, on dividends. This increases the wealth of both owners and managers, but does not make the company any more productive as little capital remains for research and development (R&D). In 2018, only 43% of all companies listed on the S&P500 index invested in any R&D.

Of the Big Five, the loss of competitiveness is perhaps the clearest in the case of Apple. The American electronics manufacturer that once pioneered and dominated the smartphone market for almost a decade has been knocked to the fourth place in global smartphone sales, losing out to East Asian competitors Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi. The only market Apple still dominates is the US, although it is worth wondering whether this would be the case if Huawei were allowed to sell its phones in the American market.

It is not to say innovation in the US has completely left the scene (for instance, the US is still a leader in microprocessors), but that the dynamism that once allowed for rapid technological change and global dominance is in decline. Tesla is another good example of a monopoly born in the US and having received billions worth of government support (see Mazzucato’s 2013 book ‘The Entrepreneurial State’) that now has increasing difficulty remaining competitive in an international setting.

The concentration of profits in the largest US companies and their dominance of entire sectors is essentially not a reflection of their superior competitiveness, but the result of a system benefiting them disproportionately while allowing them to accumulate wealth without becoming more competitive.

The lack of innovation is significant because an economy thus hollowed out of its productive capacity is bound to crumble, and, in the case of the US, allow a new power to rise and take its place in the global economy. There is only one reason that the loss of international competitiveness has not yet fully translated itself into a deterioration of living standards for Americans: the Dollar.

Further reading

Jonathan Tepper (2018): Why American Workers Aren’t Getting A Raise: An Economic Detective Story. https://www.mythofcapitalism.com/worker-s-wages
Jay Shambaugh, Ryan Nunn, Audrey Breitwieser, and Patrick Liu (2018): The state of competition and dynamism: Facts about concentration, start-ups, and related policies. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-state-of-competition-and-dynamism-facts-about-concentration-start-ups-and-related-policies/
Patrick Bet-David and Jonathan Tepper (2019): The Missing Link To Modern Day Capitalism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTGzUVH9LsA
John Coumarianos (2019): How corporate monopolies fuel wage stagnation, inequality, and populism. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-corporate-monopolies-fuel-wage-stagnation-inequality-and-populism-2019-05-06
Walter Frick (2020): Big tech’s 15-year acquisition spree had a hidden cost. https://qz.com/1883377/how-big-techs-acquisition-strategies-suppress-entrepreneurship/

This article was originally published on Kapital Economics, the platform for evidence-based economic analysis.

About the authors:

Josephine Valeske holds a MA degree in Development Studies from the ISS and a BA degree in Philosophy and Economics. Apart from contributing to Kapital Economics, she currently works for the research and advocacy organisation Transnational Institute.

Bram Nicholas holds an MBA from the University of Western Sydney and is in the process of writing a PhD on the subject of exchange rates and forex markets at the University of Colombo. He is the founder and CEO of Kapital Economics and currently lectures at HUTECH, Vietnam.

COVID-19 | The COVID-19 pandemic and oil spills in the Ecuadorian Amazon: the confluence of two crises

By ISS Blog Bliss 24 November 202019 January 2025 3947 views

How can we reframe the current planetary crisis to find ways for decisive and life-changing collective action? The Amazon region of Ecuador, at the center of two crises—COVID-19 and a major oil spill—but also home to a long history of indigenous resistance, offers some answers.

Navigating two crises

In Ecuador, the intensification of resource extraction and pollution, floods and weather disturbances have hit marginalized populations hardest. Indigenous peoples and people living in the Amazon have continuously suffered an enormous political and economic disadvantage when confronting extractive industries and allied state bodies. The vulnerability of the peoples and territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon region has been even more severely exposed during the COVID-19 lockdown period starting 16 March 2020.

On 7 April 2020, the Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System and the Heavy Crude Oil Pipeline, which transport Ecuador’s oil, collapsed. The pipelines were built along the banks of the Coca River and the collapse resulted in the spillage of an enormous quantity of crude oil into its waters. The Coca river is a key artery in the regional Amazon system. It runs through three national parks that form one of the richest biodiverse areas on Earth, which has been historically preserved by the ways of life of the indigenous peoples who inhabit it.

The breakage of the pipelines impacted kilometers of rainforest riverways and tens of thousands of people. Indigenous populations living in surrounding areas are more at risk than non-indigenous populations because they rely on locally harvested food and water, which can become contaminated. Indigenous peoples find it difficult to comply with lockdown mobility restrictions since their subsistence depends on agriculture, hunting and fishing, which in turn have been severely impacted by the oil spills. The exposure to the virus due to the entry of technicians to repair the pipelines is another threat. These conditions have led the Confederation of indigenous nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE) warning of an impending genocide.

The Coca river valley before the erosion. Photo credit: Luisa Andrade

Despite the constitutional mandate to provide free and high-quality public healthcare for all citizens, the Ecuadorian national health system is fraught with problems. Health coverage in the Amazon region is precarious with a lack of medical facilities, doctors, and not enough COVID-19 tests and ventilators required to treat an outbreak. While elderly and people with comorbidities have been identified globally as most vulnerable to infection, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights identifies indigenous people as a risk group. Indeed, historically, pathogens have been one of the most powerful factors in decimating indigenous peoples in South America.

Depending on how an issue is framed, different responses can be expected, including why something is considered or not a problem, who is responsible, and what needs to be done about it. Environmental problems derived from the extraction of natural resources such as oil are mainly framed as localized problems. Thus, the burden is placed onto affected communities and local and national governments, while their global and systematic character is disowned. What we aim to say with this is that while there are companies and governmental entities that are directly responsible, their actions respond to a global system that is based and sustained on extractivism.

As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, it is only when a crisis is understood as part of a global web of relations derived from complex power dynamics that we can imagine possibilities of globally coordinated and integrated efforts required for effective resolution. We are now living under global restrictions, which were once unimaginable, politically and economically. The rapid adaptation of quarantine and travel restrictions reveals that when the message of ‘human life is in danger’ is embraced, societies as a whole are able to perform the collective drastic changes required in a short period of time.

For Ecuadorian grassroots organizations and scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder of our interconnectedness, our collective vulnerability, and therefore our mutual obligations to our planet. The pandemic is just one aspect of the human-made planetary crisis along with biodiversity loss and climate change. We are interested in how to reframe the current planetary crisis that encompasses increasingly visible global diseases in order to find ways for decisive and life-changing collective action. We ask these questions by looking at the Amazon region of Ecuador, which is bearing the brunt of two crises: COVID-19 and environmental destruction through a major oil spill.

“In the name of development”

To understand the complexity of this human and ecological disaster, it is necessary to retrace some historical steps. On February 2, 2020, the San Rafael waterfall, the highest in Ecuador, collapsed. At that time, hydrologists warned that a phenomenon known as ‘regressive erosion’ could affect upstream infrastructure. On April 7, 2020 the Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources announced that the pipelines broke due to landslides that occurred in the San Rafael sector. Hydrologists associate the landslides with the construction and operation of the Coca-Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam (CCSHD).

Location of the most relevant events generated by the regressive erosion phenomenon of the Coca River. Infographic credit: Luisa Andrade

According to Carolina Bernal, PhD in Geomorphology and Hydrosedimentology, the CCSHD caused a serious imbalance in the transport of sediments and water through the river flow which produced a regressive erosion phenomenon which was responsible for causing sinkholes along the banks of the river. One of these sinkholes broke the oil pipelines. This risk had been mentioned in the earlier preliminary environmental impact study of the hydroelectric project.

CCSHD was inaugurated as part of Ecuador’s hydraulic mission during the presidency of Rafael Correa. The dam, like other hydroelectric projects carried out during his mandate, was politically legitimatized as “provider of clean energy and ‘good living’ for Ecuadorians and the world”. The rhetoric concerning the sustainable energy transition to renewable sources in the national energy matrix has been notably inconsistent with the dam’s high impacts on people and the environment.

The socio-environmental impacts associated with CCSHD and the oil spill were foreseen by the scientific community and civil society who were dismissed as “antidevelopmentalists” by Correa’s government. Some anticipated that the dam would a be major disruption of downstream sediment for the Napo River and would require extensive road-building and line construction in the primary forest. Others have questioned the true purpose of the dam, arguing that it was not about sustainable development for local people, but rather to provide electricity to the oil fields.

One of several sinkholes caused by the regressive erosion of the Coca River. The sinkhole captured in this picture is close to the town of San Luis. Photo credit: Carlos Sanchez (August 2020)

Going beyond business as usual

Even if the world is still embroiled in the COVID-19 pandemic, the responses to this crisis have revealed stark unequal, racial, and geopolitical differences. The indigenous populations affected by the spill and the pandemic have denounced the failure of the state to attend to these two emergencies. The many commentators on the current changes in the social and economic constellation of the world are urging for the re-evaluation of our way of life and the possibility of a radical change. For Ecuadorian indigenous organizations and the environmental justice movement, the pandemic and the environmental crises call for a radical rethinking of economic growth and our current model of development.

Scholars like Maurie Cohen see COVID-19 as “a public health emergency and a real-time experiment in downsizing the consumer economy”. Accordingly, the outbreak could potentially contribute to a sustainable consumption transition. For Phoebe Everingham and Natasha Chassagne the crisis is an opportunity to challenge the atomized individualism that underlies overconsumption. For them, Buen Vivir, a central concept to Ecuador’s development planning, drawn from the historical experience of indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with nature, is a post-pandemic alternative for moving away from capitalist growth and re-imagining a new form of traveling and tourism.

We cannot return to ‘a normal’ that ignores the global environmental crisis which led to the inequitable and polluted societies that enabled the spread of COVID-19. The extractive vision of the living world is endangering humanity’s very existence. Is there space for a greater appreciation of the complexity of these intertwined crises? When will we see, as Bayo Akomalafe states, “Earth’s interconnected geological and political processes”?.

The extractive environmental activities that underpin capitalist development and a planetary-mass consumption culture are jeopardizing the very existence of humanity. Though environmental disasters have decimated and violated the rights of indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon for years, they continue to resist. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, groups of Amazonian indigenous organizations promoted a model of autonomous governance of the Amazon region of Ecuador and Peru through the “Sacred Basins Territories of Life” initiative.

The proposal has been developed by an alliance of indigenous peoples and nationalities of Ecuador and Peru to forge a new post-carbon, post-extractive model by leaving fossil fuels and mineral resources underground, retaining around 3.8 billion metric tons of carbon, to protect our planet and the well-being of future generations. The proposal would cover around 30 million hectares of land between Ecuador and Peru, home to almost 500,000 indigenous people of 20 different nationalities. Can these counter-hegemonic proposals which claim the interconnectivity of all species in this world be critically revisited in the times of the pandemic?

COVID-19 brought the world to a halt. This ‘portal to a new era’, as Arundhati Roy proclaimed, offers us a chance to question deeply our social and economic relations. Perhaps this could be the moment in history where we also can finally reframe localized environmental disasters as global concerns and act accordingly. This is the opportunity to politically and socially rethink how to transition to a different kind of development that acknowledges and changes the damaging way global lifestyles directly impact the indigenous peoples and natures of the world.

This blog article was first published on Undisciplined Environments.

About the authors:

Jacqueline Gaybor is a Research Associate at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University, in The Hague and lecturer at Erasmus University College in Rotterdam. Email: gaybortobar@iss.nl.

Wendy Harcourt is a Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University, in The Hague. She is a member of the Editorial Collective of Undisciplined Environments. Email: harcourt@iss.nl.

COVID-19 and Conflict | How Duterte’s new Anti-Terrorism Act is terrorizing Filipino citizens, not helping them survive the COVID-19 pandemic

By ISS Blog Bliss 11 November 202019 January 2025 5984 views

The Philippines, like many other countries, has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a stronger blow was delivered to its citizens and democracy when the Anti-Terrorism Act was passed at the height of the pandemic in July this year. This event reveals President Rodrigo Duterte’s prioritization of the consolidation of his authoritarian regime’s power—at the expense of Filipino citizens. An increased state police and military presence justified as necessary for curbing the spread of COVID-19 shows that this law is being implemented, with dire implications for freedom of speech and expression as those critical of Duterte’s rule are imprisoned or terrorized.

Since current president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte came into office in 2016, over 20,000 deaths have been ascribed to his regime. Extrajudicial killings have been rampant, many justified by a ‘war against drugs’ necessitating killings to ‘root out drug criminals’, and many of the victims were from the country’s poorest population segments. National and international criticism of this approach have been strong, but has been met with resistance from the state, along with oppressive measures. Activists, farmers, peasants, indigenous peoples, unionists, journalists, lawyers, and human rights advocates accused of being communists or leftist sympathizers due to criticizing Duterte’s decisions and actions faced constant harassment and threats.

Consequently, instead of focusing on more evident socio-economic concerns such as poverty, unemployment, food security, sex trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and other pressing issues facing the country, the administration over the past years has chosen to address what was perceived as political challenges to the Duterte administration through the increased deployment of the police and military.

Things took a turn for the worse when COVID-19 spread across and took hold of the country, with the administration instrumentalizing the pandemic to encroach upon citizens’ right to dissent through its imposition of strict quarantine measures in the name of curbing the virus. This echoes other findings of the instrumental use of COVID-19 regulations for continued or increased political oppression, as in the case of Zimbabwe. In the Philippines, people were not allowed to leave their homes without proper identification cards, as well as permits issued by the local government to move around. Those who would protest, even following social distancing protocols, would be arrested without warrants or charges. The laws are seen to not be applied equally, with the administration telling its citizens to show compassion for government officials who broke quarantine rules while heavily sanctioning, harassing, and even imprisoning those who would protest, beg for food, put up community food stalls, or circumvent the absence of mass transportation.

What makes the Philippines different from other countries that have similarly implemented strict and sometimes unreasonable lockdown measures has been the parallel passing of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

As the country struggles with increasing COVID-19-related deaths and infections, the pandemic’s effects on the economy and the healthcare system have been severe. The clearest indication of the apparent authoritarian character of the state, and its failure to govern on behalf of its people, has been the swift formulation and passage of the country’s Anti-Terrorism Act. The implementation of this law in July this year in an attempt to further control the country shows evidence of a focus on strengthening the Duterte regime and stifling opposition at a time when a state intervention to relieve citizens of the burden of the COVID-19 lockdown should have been the first priority.

Silencing dissent, exacerbating the lockdown’s effects

The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 replaces and expands the definition of terrorism under the old Human Security Act. This could have far-reaching consequences: the law essentially allows for the state to suppress freedom of speech in a way that transgresses human rights. The removal of certain key provisions in the Human Security Act are of particular concern: 1) the right to due process; 2) the right against unreasonable searches and seizures; 3) the right to privacy and correspondence; and 4) the right to freedom of expression and association. Moreover, the act enables detention on mere suspicion of a crime, longer detentions without charge and no remedies, and no liability on law enforcement.

This law hence provides the government with the legal tools to oppress and silence those who dissent and oppose injustice. United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet pointed out how the law has a “chilling effect on human rights and humanitarian work”. In light of the pandemic, these clauses make it more difficult for ordinary citizens to access legal remedies to protect their human rights, organize, or peacefully dissent because of their inability to assemble.

On June 26^th this year, Rey Valmores-Salinas, Bahaghari’s^[1] national spokesperson, organized a Pride march in Mendiola as a means to make known the unified voice of the LGBT sector against authoritarian and ineffective COVID-19 responses. Critical of the ‘militarized’ policing of adherence to lockdown regulations, hundreds of protesters took to the streets and clashed with the police, leading to mass arrest based on unfounded charges .

Similarly, members of the national civil society organization Unyon ng Mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA)^[2] due to their demand for basic needs and livelihood support in the time of COVID-19 have been terrorized by the state police on an ongoing basis. There have been several instances of unannounced raids made at the homes of organization members, which have been framed as a ‘necessary part of the government’s house-to-house contact-tracing interventions to curb the spread of COVID-19’. Antonio ‘Ka Tonying’ Flores, UMA’s national chairperson, claimed that this was a smokescreen for ‘red-tagging’ activists who are considered insurgents by the state. Even their relief operations and community kitchens that have helped assist the poorest communities of the country during the lockdown have been disrupted by the state military and police on several occasions, apparently because they ‘pose a threat to the authoritarian Duterte regime’. This is substantiated with the state’s belief that these forms of gathering could lead to community organizing towards a unified resistance against the Duterte regime.

The use of armed forces to contain the pandemic, as well as the silence of dissenters, is cause for alarm, as it may signify an unchecked abuse of state power and the lack of prioritization of addressing the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on the country. The Anti-Terrorism Act that has allowed for oppressive state actions has led to the terrorization of ordinary citizens—and to the increased alienation of the citizenry from the state. We are using this space to create a platform for dialogue and awareness of what is happening to the Philippines as it continues to suffer the effects of the pandemic and the authoritarian state. There are currently 15 groups petitioning against the law at the Supreme Court. We call upon the international community to keep a watchful eye and to stand in solidarity with the country.

About this article:

This research on COVID-19 responses in authoritarian state settings was conducted between June and August this year as part of the ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’ (Discord) project. The methods utilized include a desk review of secondary data sources and interviews with key informants who initiated locally-led/grassroots interventions between March 2020 and present in response to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the ‘COVID-19 and Conflict’ Blog Series: When Disasters, Conflict and COVID-19 Collide:

Responding to the international COVID-19 pandemic is particularly complex in settings of (post) conflict and/or conflict settings underpinned by authoritarian political regimes. In such scenarios, the national responses to the pandemic may be weakened, the infrastructure to respond adequately may be lacking, and power games may easily ensue where response to the pandemic get instrumentalized to serve political interests. To get a better grasp of the interaction and dynamics of top-down and bottom-up COVID-19 responses in such settings, research was conducted in seven different contexts over the summer of 2020, and the findings will be showcased on Bliss through several blog articles.

The research underlying the blogs was facilitated by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and made possible by a NWO grant (number 453-14-013). It is linked to the research project ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’ (Discord) hosted at the ISS. More comprehensive findings of the case studies will be shared in different formats, including working papers or articles, on the VICI research webpage: www.iss.nl/whendisastermeetsconflict

^[1] Bahaghari is a national-democratic organization of LGBT militants and patriots in the Philippines. It is struggling alongside oppressed people for national emancipation in the fields of economy, politics, and culture. (https://www.facebook.com/BahaghariLGBT/)

^[2] Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA Pilipinas) is the national progressive center of unions, federations, and organizations of agricultural workers in the Philippines. (https://umapilipinas.wordpress.com/)

About the authors:

Patricia Luzano Enriquez holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies, specializing in Social Policy for Development, from the ISS of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests and socio-political activism include intersectional feminism, gender, sexuality, human rights, and social justice. She is based in The Hague.

Martin Dacles is a scholar-activist specializing in disaster risk reduction, resilience building, and the localization of humanitarian aid, in Asia Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. He recently obtained his Master’s degree in Development Studies at the ISS of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently, he is based in Sint Maarten, the Caribbean as the DRR Delegate of The Netherlands Red Cross.

COVID-19 and Conflict | How pandemic regulations are being used to target the political opposition in Zimbabwe

By ISS Blog Bliss 5 November 202019 January 2025 5171 views

Introduction to ‘Covid-19 and Conflict’ Blog Series: When Disasters, Conflict and Covid-19 Collide

Responding to the international Covid-19 pandemic is particularly complex in settings of (post) conflict and/or conflict settings underpinned by authoritarian political regimes. In such scenarios, the national responses to the pandemic may be weakened, the infrastructure to respond adequately may be lacking, and power games may easily ensue where response to the pandemic get instrumentalised to serve political interests. To get a better grasp of the interaction and dynamics of top-down and bottom-up Covid-19 responses in such settings, research was conducted in seven different contexts over the summer of 2020, and the findings will be showcased on Bliss through several blog articles.

Covid-19 and Conflict | How pandemic regulations are being used to target the political opposition in Zimbabwe

By James Kunhiak Muorwel, Lara Vincent and Lize Swartz

Relatively few Covid-19 infections and deaths have been registered in Zimbabwe, yet the Southern African country has been hit hard by the pandemic. Our recent research on Covid-19 responses in Zimbabwe shows that in the face of a strict lockdown and ongoing economic repercussions, one of the biggest worries for Zimbabwean citizens ironically is falling prey to the instrumental and strategic use of laws meant to protect them from the virus, which are apparently being used to continue decades-long political repression.

While Zimbabwe has registered relatively few Covid-19 cases since the virus first appeared here on 20 March this year, the country’s political and socio-economic situation has ensured that the pandemic’s impact has been severe despite low infection and death rates. A country in Sub-Saharan Africa notorious for years of misrule and economic mismanagement under Robert Mugabe following independence from Britain in 1980, Zimbabwe’s challenges have been severe. Now, hopes of progress in the country’s ongoing bid to free itself from the chains of dictatorship that have bound it for decades and the consequent economic effects that continue to haunt the country following the transition to a new government have been dashed by the onset of the pandemic in March. Critical voices have been forcefully silenced by the current regime, which has used the pandemic as a pretext for renewed political repression.

Research on Covid-19 responses in Zimbabwe carried out between June and August this year by James Kunhiak Muorwel and Lara Vincent sought to provide a compact overview of grounded experiences of life in Zimbabwe during the lockdown. For the research, the greatest challenges for civil society, in particular given Zimbabwe’s fragile political context, were investigated by conducting online interviews with some key informants and studying reports, news articles, and other sources. A few key findings are detailed below.

Like most other countries, following the first registered case of Covid-19 in March this year, Zimbabwe introduced stringent measures to slow the spread of the virus. Measures were rolled out in two phases: first, in April, the country was placed under a total lockdown lasting for 21 days. All economic activity ceased as people were confined to their houses, forced to eke out a living and survive on the bare minimum. Then, the economy was partially reopened and the movement of people eased in a bid to prevent the economy from suffering further and to counter hunger and increased poverty.

But especially in the first lockdown phase, many Zimbabweans were forced to break lockdown regulations—with severe consequences. A majority of Zimbabweans rely on the informal sector for their living. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that extreme poverty in the country is on the rise – “from 29 percent in 2018 to 34 percent in 2019”. It could even get worse when you add to the mix the impact of the pandemic and lockdown on the country.

The impact has already been significant, compounded by health and sanitation problems, poor economic performance, high unemployment rates, droughts, food insecurity, corruption, and the general political climate in the country. Closing businesses and restricting free movement of the majority of the population who rely on informal jobs for survival as part of the lockdown might have been economic suicide for the country. As lockdown measures took effect and most businesses remained closed, many families went hungry, without money to stock enough food. Basic staple food items such as mealie meal (maize meal) became scarce. Cases of gender-based violence have spiked during this period partly because families are confined to one living environment for longer periods than before the lockdown. It may have also exacerbated anxiety and mental health problems.

Many Zimbabweans thus felt they had no choice but to disobey the regulations, our research shows. Their actions attracted a disproportionate response from the government. In July 2020, the BBC reported that 105,000 people said to have breached restrictions were arrested. These numbers quoted are between March (when the lockdown came into effect) and July, but more people might be behind bars. Parliamentarians representing the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a renowned journalist, as well as a prominent novelist were arrested in July for organizing an ‘illegal’ gathering to protest against the lockdown measures, exposing corruption, and demand for the resignation of President Emerson Mnangagwa. The government has called those arrested “dark forces,” and the protesters a “few bad apples”.

Our interviews[1] with research participants, as well as a study of NGO reports and continuous allegations by human rights groups, have revealed widespread arrests and money extortion by the state’s security apparatuses during the lockdown. As Peter[2], one of the research participants, bluntly stated, “for me, the lockdown was a convenient political state of emergency, not necessarily a public health statement.” He also expressed his frustration that citizens who were being arrested for breaking lockdown regulations were being placed in crowded cells where social distancing was not possible.

The phenomenon of arresting opposition figures is not new. For over four decades, the political regime headed by former president Robert Mugabe was characterized by violent suppression of political dissent. The opposition was targeted under the pretext of bogus laws that made their actions appear illegal. His successor, current President Manangagwa, has also been accused by human rights groups and the opposition party of using old tactics to exploit the current situation. Yet the transition to a new political regime following Mugabe’s toppling brought hope to many Zimbabweans. It now seems overshadowed by the threat of violent repression—the spectre seems to have not disappeared, after all.

Staying at home is not an option for most Zimbabweans, especially when they do not have savings or social protection measures to help them bear the economic burden of the pandemic lockdown. As they continue moving around, they continue putting themselves at risk of arrest and torture by the police, first, and of infection with Covid-19, second. What will the consequences be?

Zimbabwe is not the first country to treat a pandemic or a disasters triggered by natural hazards as a national security issue, but it is the consequences of the government’s actions at this particular time that are worrying. We anticipate that harassment and illegal arrests of political opponents and vendors by police in the name of lockdown violations will leave the society polarised more than ever before thereby setting the stage for more street confrontations between the security apparatuses and the demonstrators. It is troubling that there is a brutal crackdown on the violation of lockdown regulations without taking into account the circumstances, and we see that street vendors, commuters and the like are treated as political opponents. It is imperative to continue sharing grounded experiences of political repression in Zimbabwe and to speak out against it so that it does not undo all the progress that has been achieved in the last few years in reversing the devastating impacts of Zimbabwe’s rule under Mugabe’s dictatorial regime.

[1] A research project on Covid-19 in Zimbabwe that was conducted by Lara Vincent and James Kunhiak Muorwel between June and August 2020 was part of the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam’s “When Disaster Meets Conflict” project that looks at ‘informing better linkages between top-down, external measures and local, socially and culturally appropriate initiatives’. NWO project number 453/14/013

[2] Name has been changed to protect interviewee’s identity.

About the authors:

James Kunhiak Muorwel holds an MA degree in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam and BA in Business Administration from Makerere University. His recent research was on the Covid-19 situation in Zimbabwe. He also has many years of work experience with international development organisations, including the UN. Follow him on Twitter @JKunhiak

Lara Vincent holds an MA degree in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. While at ISS she majored in Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies, with a specialisation in Environment and Sustainable Development.

Lize Swartz is the editor of ISS Blog Bliss and a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She researches the biopolitics of water scarcity in South Africa.

Covid-19 | Worsening inequality in the developing world: why we should say no to a ‘new normal’

By ISS Blog Bliss 28 October 20205 November 2020 5377 views

Over the past months, the world has come to experience the unthinkable as the Covid-19 pandemic has swept across the globe (Mahapatra, 2020). The overall outlook for world economy is bleak. According to Economist Intelligence Unit, as from March 17, global economic growth has slowed to just one percent—the lowest level of growth since the global financial crisis of 2008 (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2020). The pandemic has affected both the developing and developed world. However, instances of hunger, unemployment and poor access to virus testing and treatment facilities are more prevalent in developing countries (World Food Programme Report, 2020).

Developed countries are taking important measures to protect their people from the Covid-19 virus and consequent slowdown of the economy and life in general by providing unemployment benefits, measures for food security, and privileges such as facilities enabling employees and entrepreneurs to work from home or at a safe distance from one another (Mahapatra, 2020). This is a rare case in the developing world, where governments face challenges in ensuring that tens of millions of people already on verge of starvation do not succumb to virus and its adverse economic consequences, which includes hunger (Dongyu, 2020).

Thus, the pandemic, popularly referred to as the ‘pandemic of inequality’ (Mahaptara, 2020), has exposed existing inequalities and has given rise to new inequalities. According to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres,

COVID-19 has highlighted growing inequalities. It has exposed the myth that everyone is in same boat, when the truth is, we all are floating in same sea; some are in superyachts, while others are clinging to drifting debris.

It is becoming clear that the pandemic is affecting the poor in both the developed and developing world more than wealthier groups, but it is especially the long-term effects of the pandemic in developing countries that remain a cause for concern. The pandemic has created a disruptive ‘new normal’ for everyone through government orders on social distancing and Covid-19 protection measures. Below are just some of the negative effects of this ‘new normal’ that support our argument that it should not be accepted as such.

First, for billions of poor persons, these guidelines are burdensome and impossible to comply with (Du et al., 2020). Poor informal workers in Asia, Africa and Latin America live in densely populated neighbourhoods with unreliable and shared access to water and sanitation facilities, making home quarantine or social distancing almost impossible. These workers lack access to bank accounts, insurance and secure employment that forces them to work on daily basis, defying lockdowns and creating an increased risk of Covid-19 transmission (Du et al., 2020). For them, a ‘new normal’ means not being able to work and meet basic needs.

Second, the hunger crisis is most evident in the central and western parts of Africa, where there has been a massive spike in the number of people facing food insecurity. Up to 90% of people living in Southern Africa are estimated to have become food insecure (World Food Programme Report, 2020). The closure of schools has further aggravated the hunger crisis in the developing world where children are highly dependent on meal programs at schools. For example, in Latin American countries and the Caribbean, the closure of schools during the pandemic has deprived around 85 million children of what is often the only (hot) meal they get daily (Dongyu Qu, 2020). This has led to surging hunger-related poverty during the pandemic. However, this is not the case in Global North, where school closures are simply an inconvenience for most parents.

Moreover, the lockdowns have left millions of workers jobless, especially the informal workforce in the developed and developing world (Daniyal et al., 2020). Workers in developed countries are still better off than those in the developing world as governments in US and Europe have pledged to pump trillions of dollars to support the unemployed workforce (TRT World, 2020). In contrast, the situation is grim in developing countries as informal workers are not covered by any social protection measures or proper employment contracts (TRT World, 2020). Millions of workers in Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, and India have faced unemployment as the market remains shut due to the pandemic.

Why we should resist a ‘new normal’

As the pandemic drags on, many people in wealthier countries or those in developing countries with secure jobs or livelihoods, especially those whose lives are disrupted but not severely negatively affected, especially in economic terms, are getting used to the ‘new normal’. For many people, a ‘new normal’ means working from home, not visiting restaurants, not going on holidays outside of our countries, and having to wear a face mask. For millions people who are less fortunate, a ‘new normal’ means a loss of jobs and the inability to secure new employment, going to bed hungry, and working illegally with an exposed risk to the virus.

We have to reject this ‘new normal’ characterized by worsening living conditions and increasing economic inequality before it becomes seen as accepted and a permanent feature of life among poor people in developing and developed countries alike. The search for a vaccine and its global roll-out may take many months still. We have to start think beyond the end of the pandemic to ensure that its negative effects, particularly for people in developing countries, are urgently addressed. If we don’t, the consequences can be far-reaching.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]References:

Dongyu Qu, “Coronavirus could worsen hunger in developing world”, World Economic Forum, accessed September 15, 2020. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-worsen-hunger-developing-world/

Economist Intelligence Unit, “Coronavirus what we expect for global growth”, accessed September 16, 2020. http://country.eiu.com/article.aspx?articleid=1849161968&Country=United%20States&topic=Economy&subtopic=Recent+developments

Jillian Du, Robin King and Radha Chanchani, “Tackling Inequality in cities is Essential for Fighting COVID-19”, accessed September 15, 2020. https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/04/coronavirus-inequality-cities

Richard Mahapatra, “COVID-19: The Pandemic of Inequality”, accessed September 15, 2020. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/economy/covid-19-the-pandemic-of-inequality-72442

Oxfam, “Half a billion people could be pushed into poverty by coronavirus, warns Oxfam”, accessed September 14, 2020. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/half-billion-people-could-be-pushed-poverty-coronavirus-warns-oxfam

Sara Christensen, “Hunger in Developing Countries: Five Facts You Need to Know”, accessed September 16, 2020. https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-developing-countries-five-facts/

Shoaib Daniyal et al., “As Covid-19 pandemic hits India’s daily-wage earners hard, some leave city for their home towns”, accessed September 16, 2020. https://scroll.in/article/956779/starvation-will-kill-us-before-corona-the-covid-19-pandemic-has-hit-indias-working-class-hard

TRT World. “Coronavirus hits jobs, Millions face unemployment and poverty”, accessed September 15, 2020. Retrieved from TRT World: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/coronavirus-hits-jobs-millions-face-unemployment-and poverty-35294

Tasfia Jahangir, “The Moral Dilemma of Slum Tourism”, accessed September 15, 2020. https://fundforeducationabroad.org/journals/moral-dilemma-slum-tourism/

World Food Programme, “COVID-19: Potential Impact on World’s Poorest People”, accessed September 15, 2020. https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000114205/download/?_ga=2.261738637.121369336.1599543905-1508832003.1599543905

[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1604570090932{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]About the authors:

Shradha Parashari is an ISS of Erasmus University Rotterdam alumna of the 2017-2018 batch. She is currently working as a Research and Operation Associate at PAD India.

Lize Swartz is a PhD researcher at the ISS focusing on water user interactions with sustainability-climate crises in the water sector, in particular the role of water scarcity politics on crisis responses and adaptation processes. She is also the editor of the ISS Blog Bliss.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1596795191151{margin-top: 5% !important;}”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

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Covid-19 | How moving (academic) conferences online could help address social injustices

By ISS Blog Bliss 22 October 202019 January 2025 4392 views

Curtailing the movement of people around the world in a bid to control and eventually stop the spread of Covid-19 has forced many, including academics, to gather online. A recent online conference of the European Consortium for Political Research I attended shows that such conferences can not only be a roaring success, but can also help address social injustices, in particular economic and social barriers to participation. Yet these practices should become the ‘new norm’ to ensure that these barriers are broken down once and for all.

In August 2020 the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) held its first virtual general conference. This event also marked its 50-year anniversary. Remarkably, despite the restrictions, it still managed to virtually bring together over 2,000 researchers to discuss political science, including the politics of the Covid-19 crisis.

As a conference participant coming from an institution whose key focus is social justice, the important social justice dimensions of the event did not elude me. In this article, I highlight some of these dimensions to proffer what I believe may be cardinal collateral gains towards social justice within academia emerging from the otherwise unfortunate outbreak of the corona virus. Using the ECPR case example, I seek to make a global argument that these gains would be maximised if they are immediately and widely consolidated as a feature of such conferences.

As early as April 14^th, 2020 the World Health Organisation had issued an alert on mass international gatherings in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This alert, which has led to a new global norm on limiting the gathering of a large number of people, therefore meant that the ECPR’s conference, if held physically, was going to raise many eyebrows. The body thus decided to take the conference online, attracting a perhaps unprecedented number of participants. The ECPR president noted that the virtual conference hosted more participants than the previous physical general conference. So it was probably a good decision to have the conference run virtually.

In my view, the idea to have a virtual rather than a physical conference had two main gains that help to address some of the social injustices that for a long time have been entrenched within the academic sphere. For readers that may be new to the idea of social justice, it is a critical political and philosophical view of society that is concerned with the fair and just relations between individuals in society. This issue became salient at the ECPR’s event because the virtual nature of the conference broke down two of the barriers that disable some academics from taking full advantage of such academically stimulating platforms: an economic barrier and a social barrier.

The conference broke down an economic barrier by providing easy access to participants who may not have had the financial resources required to travel and pitch camp in a physical location. Here, I refer to the huge flight and hotel costs that would have been a deal-breaker for many of such people, including myself. In addition, conference registration costs can run up to several hundred euros. Groups that usually suffer from such setbacks include students, both at the Master’s and PhD level, as well as academics from less-financially-endowed institutions or countries.

Yet, members from these groups contribute some of the most original and case-sensitive analyses of social and political science, thereby contributing to the academic debates upon which associations such as the ECPR thrive. For a long time, barriers of this calibre have limited some of these voices in these discourses, and perhaps this new virtualisation of academic life is the pathway to raising their voices.

For the ECPR specifically, the Western European origins of the consortium has for a long time kept researchers from Eastern Europe from fully participating in these conferences. Yet, they were ubiquitous this time round on almost all the 15 panels that I participated in. As a researcher interested in the politics of conflicts, I gathered the most relevant insights from these Eastern European participants and other participants from the Middle East. It is likely that physical conferences may have created a lot more barriers to their participation.

Second, the conference broke down a social barrier, particularly one preventing females from participating in conferences, rooted in the absence of females in academia in general. Perhaps readers may be aware of the so-called leaky pipeline phenomenon characterising how women fall out of the scene as they progress in their academic careers. This a significant social justice issue that many responsible organisations are trying to deal with, including the ECPR. As the president’s anniversary address acknowledges, there are many more women involved in the ECPR’s activities both at administrative and academic levels. Indeed, throughout the conference, female panellists were a frequent encounter that I welcomed. Yet, I could not help but wonder how difficult it must be for many of them to juggle their child-rearing duties with spending a week away, possibly on another continent, to attend an academic conference.

With this in mind, it is clear to me how the Covid-19-induced virtualisation of academic life may provide some opportunity to academics and researchers with such responsibilities to actively participate in the academic fraternity whilst tending to their role in home economics. Of course, conferencing online from home is no walk in the park either, but in my view, it is less of a burden to have to return to those duties just after one hour of online engagement than having to be way for a whole week for the same purpose.

Whilst highlighting these gains, I am not oblivious of the other forms of injustices that virtual conferences also present. Here I refer to the loss of jobs in the hospitality industry that hosts conferences, or the outrageous financial gains these virtualizations rake in for owners of online communication platforms. Nevertheless, I am also persuaded by the campaigns led by some senior colleagues at my university to tone down the current climatically and financially unsustainable model of flying thousands of participants every year to conferences.

Already, deep voices within the scientific community are predicting that the ‘new normal’ is expected to stay. Yet I am concerned that perhaps these gains exemplified by the ECPR’s virtual general conference may not be consolidated, at least not in the immediate future. From the plenary address and the post-conference questionnaire, I can gather that the ECPR is already considering at least some physical meeting during next year’s general conference. Other conferences may possibly be considering doing the same.

Yet, it is my view that the failure to immediately entrench the above-highlighted Covid-19-induced shifts to improving social justice within the academe would be ‘one step forward, two steps backward’. I hope it won’t be.

About the author:

Dennis Penu (penu@iss.nl) is a PhD Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam with research interests in the links between political geography and conflicts studied with qualitative comparative methods.

Covid-19 | Strengthening alliances in a post-Covid world: green recovery as a new opportunity for EU-China climate cooperation?

By ISS Blog Bliss 30 September 202019 January 2025 5552 views

As nations turn their attention to fighting the economic crisis resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, green recovery seems to be a good—and perhaps for the first time, possible—option. As climate change remains the most pressing challenge despite the severity of the global Covid-19 pandemic, a green recovery plan to slow down global warming and meet climate goals becomes imperative. Leaders in the EU are taking the lead in greening the recovery, while China seems to be following suit. A ‘green consciousness’ seems to be emerging. Could these efforts improve EU-China relations and help these two global powerhouses work together to fight climate change? asks Hao Zhang.

As the IMF’s latest report on fiscal policies shows, the Covid-19 crisis won’t change the global climate that is also in crisis, but responses to it might. Even though science hasn’t produced an answer on whether the current economic crisis induced by the pandemic will indeed affect the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, efforts to address it certainly will. It is undeniable that the current health and economic crisis together create a threat to our current development trajectory and that the scope and severity of the issue to some extent make lasting efforts and immediate actions crucial. These decisions on how we will recover from the pandemic and the resulting crisis will shape our society for the next few decades and, even more importantly perhaps, how we deal with our climate and environmental challenges. As the IPCC’s report warned that our current ambition and willingness are far from pushing us to reach our goal of containing global warming, a green recovery plan becomes imperative in a post-Covid-19 world.

The question then arises: How do we green our recovery? As the IMF suggests, fiscal policymakers should take the lead in making policies that support climate goals without undermining the purpose of boosting the economy. Then, finance ministries should be able to set up concrete and practical projects to implement these policies. In addition, public support for the green policies with the rationale that curbing emissions would likely reduce the risk of respiratory diseases is indispensable. In a post-Covid-19 world, this might sway the public in support of green measures in a way it never has before.

The EU seems to be taking the lead in employing green measures to recover its lockdown-hit economies. As policymakers tend to believe that a green plan can better help revive the economy, concrete actions can be witnessed. In May this year, the European Commission proposed a €750 billion recovery fund with green conditions, 25% of which is to be set aside for climate action, meaning that one-quarter of expenditure with a ‘do-no-harm’ clause can potentially rule out environmentally damaging investments.[1] In addition, the Commission also issued a €1.85 trillion, seven-year budget and pandemic recovery package. This EU green recovery package could be introduced elsewhere to stimulate the economy while fighting climate change.

In addition, the EU launched the world’s largest programs for innovative low-carbon technologies under the fund from the EU’s emissions trading system. This innovation fund is created to finance breakthrough technologies for renewable energy, energy-intensive industries, carbon capture, use and storage, etc. These could help create local job opportunities, lead the economy to a climate-neutral place, and also help the EU maintain its technological leadership in climate change. It is obvious that the EU pays great attention to the future of clean technologies, yet it allows member states and the market space to decide how the money is spent. The member states will be allowed to use their allocations from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility for a wide range of green projects detailed in their national energy climate plans, and their proposals will be reviewed by the Commission; at the same time, private capital will be encouraged to invest in clean energy technologies.

On the other side of the world, in China, residents also survived the first wave of the pandemic, and the government is now also making recovery plans. This May, in the report on the work of the government, the development of renewable energy and efforts toward the clean and efficient use of coal were emphasized.[2] At the same time, this year for the first time Beijing has decided not to set an economic growth target, which is interpreted as a way to help China shift away from energy-intensive infrastructure projects.[3] This indeed has sent out a very positive signal; however, given that China still hasn’t submitted its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for the next reporting round, it also raises concerns about a lack of practical assurance.

Nevertheless, the cooperation between the EU and China in regard to green recovery seems promising. At the recent 22nd China-EU Summit on September 14 this year, President Xi Jinping stated that

China is interested in forging a green partnership with the EU and constructively participating in the global process of tackling climate change and preserving biodiversity. We are researching on reaching our long-term vision in the mid-century,[4] which includes carbon-peaking and carbon-neutrality.[5]

It is thus obvious that economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic is considered a top priority for leaders of both the EU and China, and it becomes increasingly clear that both parties are interested in a recovery package that aligns with their green transition goals.

Looking ahead, the EU and China can cooperate with each other in a few fields. First, the EU’s experiences could help China transition more rigorously to the use of green energy, especially in cutting the number of carbon-powered plants and subsidizing new energy vehicles. Second, the EU and China could agree to channel public and private funds to low-carbon investments both at home and abroad. Both parties are big investors of overseas development projects; they can thus work together to invest in projects subject to green terms. Going a step further, the EU and China could also work on developing international standards for sustainable finance[6], and China could learn from the EU’s experience in committing to more ambitious climate targets, specifically making ‘decarbonization’ a top priority in its next five-year plan.[7] Hopes are high for future cooperation between the EU and China in leading the world toward a green recovery, yet key decisions need to be made by both parties.

[1] Refer to Climate Home News, “EU €750 billion Covid recovery fund comes with green conditions”, May 27, 2020.

[2] Refer to ccchina.org.cn, 一图读懂2020政府工作报告, May 29, 2020.

[3] Refer to Climate Home News, “China prioritises employment over GDP growth in coronavirus recovery”, May 22, 2020.

[4] President Xi confirmed that China will try to reach carbon-neutrality before 2060 in his speech at a high-level meeting to mark the UN’s 75^th anniversary on September 22^nd, 2020.

[5] Refer to Global Times, “推动疫后全球经济复苏中欧领导人视频会晤定目标”, September 15, 2020.

[6] Refer to China Dialogue, “Hopes for EU-China climate deal centre on a green recovery”, June 17, 2020.

[7] Refer to China Dialogue, “中欧气候协议前景如何？”, September 14, 2020.

About the author:

Hao Zhang is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Before joining ISS, she was a master’s student majoring international affairs at School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California, San Diego. Her current research focus on policy advocacy of Chinese NGOs in global climate governance. Her research interests lie in Chinese politics, global climate politics and diplomacy.

How COVID-19 is tragically exposing systemic vulnerabilities in Peru

By ISS Blog Bliss 25 August 202019 January 2025 6173 views

Despite early assessments that Peru was faring well in the COVID-19 pandemic and that its preparedness was due to its strict application of austerity and reforms over the last 30 years, these quickly turned out to be tragically premature as the country emerged over the summer as one of the worst impacted globally in terms of confirmed deaths per capita. While much of the blame has been focused on people’s behaviour, the crisis ultimately points to deep overlapping structural inequalities within the social protection, employment, and health systems, which austerity and reform have not resolved and in some cases worsened.

Precocious optimism followed by demise

Peru was one of the first countries to adopt strict measures to cope with COVID-19 in Latin America. A week after the first COVID-19 case was reported on 6 March, the country closed its borders on 13 March and declared a mandatory immobilization, allowing the population to go out only for acquiring essential services. At the same time, it launched an economic plan equivalent to 12% of the GDP, considered by experts as unprecedented – the greatest economic stimulus in Latin America against COVID-19. The plan included cash transfers for the vulnerable population, subsidies for services and salaries, food provisioning, financial aid for companies, and a large budget allocation for the health system, among other measures.

The current Minister of Economy and Finance, Maria Antonieta Alva, argued that the last 30 years of good fiscal behaviour – as a result of the strict application of austerity measures – allowed the country to face this health and economic crisis. These statements and international news coverage created a positive narrative that seemed to vindicate the country’s economic and social policies in recent decades. Even as recently as 21 July, an article in the Financial Times presented Peru as better prepared for the crisis compared to other countries in the region that were in worse fiscal and macroeconomic positions, such as neighbouring Ecuador.

However, this congratulatory assessment was tragically premature, as has now become evident. As of 24 August, Peru has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths per capita in Latin America and second only to Belgium globally (and soon to overtake), at 842 per million people, versus 542 for Brazil or 468 for Mexico. It also has the sixth largest number of confirmed cases in the world, with 600,438 confirmed cases. Per capita, it has slightly more confirmed cases than Brazil and more than four times than Mexico.

After initially controlling a sharp spike in cases in late May, daily confirmed cases first plateaued at between 3,000 to 4,000 per day, and after removing the nationwide quarantine on 30 June, they again surged since the beginning of August to surpass the peak levels reported in May (see Figure 1). Confirmed deaths have been running at about 200 deaths a day since July after a peak of about 300 a day in June (see Figure 2).[efn_note]All data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (last accessed 24 August 2020).

Source of both figures: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/peru/ (last accessed 24 August 2020).

The dire comparison with its neighbours is partly due to a much higher level of testing (besides Chile), which is also reflective of at least one aspect of greater capacity in the health system (and it also underscores the certain underestimation of the severity of the crisis in Mexico and Ecuador). However, this statistic is also problematic because the Peruvian numbers include both PCR as well as serology tests, with the large majority being serological, whereas other countries only include PCR tests. As a result, the numbers are not comparable, although this being said, Peru’s positivity rate is also one of the highest in the world, meaning that far more testing is needed relative to the current prevalence of infection.[efn_note]

The Peruvian numbers include both PCR as well as serology tests, with the large majority being serological. For instance, about three quarters of the total confirmed cases were detected through serology as of 16 August. In contrast, other countries in the region only count PCR tests, as recommended by the WHO. As a result, the numbers are not comparable.

This also results in some confusion. Our World in Data (OWID) does not even report testing numbers for Peru given the lack of up-to-date data on how much of the current testing involves PCR tests, whereas the positivity rate reported in the John Hopkins University site, at over 50%, is linked to the OWID data and appears outdated. The government itself reports a positivity rate of 19%, although given that this includes serology tests, the rate that is comparable to other countries would be much higher, giving Peru one of the highest positivity rates in the world. (Note that the WHO recommends a positivity rate of 5-12%).

The problem with serology tests is also that they have a high rate of false negatives and antibody responses typically only develop one or more weeks after the onset of symptoms. Hence, while they are more effective than PCR tests for studying population prevalence, they are of relatively little use for diagnostic purposes of detecting cases with sufficient time to stop contagion, or what is known as epidemiological vigilance. The political decision of using predominantly serology tests is considered as one of the biggest mistakes of the COVID-19 response of the government and the new Minister of Health changed the strategy by gradually replacing serology with PCR tests in the second week of August.[/efn_note]

Proximate explanations of failure: mobility and behaviour

The lack of success in controlling the pandemic was partially due to an inability to restrict peoples’ mobility despite the lockdown, which has been widely reported in media and noted by commentators. This became more evident following the initial 15-day quarantine period, even despite the extension of this initial period. As in many parts of the world, migrant workers in places such as the capital city of Lima began returning to their places of origin by foot. Specialists also noted that the lack of refrigerators in households and the habit of buying fresh products caused people to go out to markets frequently. Social protection measures to help vulnerable people ironically made this situation worse. For instance, a monetary grant of 760 soles (about 214 USD) was one of the measures intended to help people without a formal income and who lost their job because of COVID-19. However, the payment of the grant caused people to crowd in the banks. Indeed, markets and banks became the main hot spots of infection.

As a result, many experts claimed that people’s behaviour was the main factor that undermined the COVID-19 response, that lack of education about health care and respect for rules was aggravating the spread of the virus, especially among poor people. However, the discussion generally revolves around proximate reasons rather than highlighting fundamental structural inequalities that in fact point back to the legacy of social and economic policies over the last 30 years.

More fundamental structural reasons

Although the COVID-19 response at first seemed to be strong and promising, it actually quickly exposed the deep and overlapping structural problems within the social protection system, the employment structure, and the health system, which 30 years of reform did not resolve and in some cases worsened.

One crucial problem, as noted above, is the high degree of informality, which is estimated at 72.5% of the economically active population (16.511 million people), with no access to any formal social security. Poverty was estimated at about one-fifth of the national population in 2018, based on a money-metric poverty line of 344 soles (roughly 98 USD) per person per month (the extreme poverty line was 183 soles). This means that about half of employed people were informal but not considered poor by this metric, even though they might have been just above the poverty line.

Moreover, only a fraction of those deemed poor receive assistance. For instance, before the lockdown, only about 725,000 households were affiliated with the main cash transfer programme (Juntos), or less than 9% of households in the general household register that is used for poverty targeting. Those uncovered and working informally become part of the ‘missing middle’ given that they are also not covered by any social protection.

As noted above, the government has created different monetary subsidies and adapted the existing cash transfer programmes to address the vulnerability of these uncovered populations. As of 21 August, these have been extended in principle to more than 8.5 million households, with transfer values from 160 soles to 760 soles (it is unclear whether these are monthly or one-off payments). However, the government has not yet completed paying many of these households and for many it would amount to only one transfer within the six-month period from March to August. Beyond such limited support and facing unemployment with little or no savings, adhering to mobility restrictions were quite simply unrealistic or impossible for a large majority of the population.

In addition, although Peru is in a better fiscal or financial position compared to other Latin American countries, this position was achieved by austerity and reforms that have undermined the public health system. Health specialists have noted the lack of historical investment in this system, as well as fragmentation and inequality, all of which have hampered the COVID-19 response effectiveness.[efn_note]In effect, Peru has had one of the lowest levels of investment in health as percentage of GDP in Latin America (5% versus 6.6% on average) and this level increased only 0.27 percentage points between 2010 and 2016 despite rapid economic growth. It also has lower per capita spending on health ($679 USD), but with higher capital investment in health as percentage of GDP (0.32%), above the Latin American average (0.19%) – see pages 121, 127 and 139 here.[/efn_note]

Austerity clearly contributed to critical deficiencies in terms of infrastructure, human resources and medical supplies, and also constrained the composition of health spending, producing inefficient combinations of spending and thus impacting negatively on the implementation of services. For instance, Peru has a higher number of beds per capita compared with Ecuador and Mexico, but a lower number of doctors (see here). The distribution has also been historically uneven among the regions.[efn_note]For instance, in terms of the number of health professionals per 10,000 people, Lima (41.4), Callao (50.1), Arequipa (41.5), Tacna (44.3), Apurimac (48.9) have more than double to number of Piura (21.4), San Martin (21.8), Loreto (22.3), which have the lowest rates (see p.22 here).[/efn_note]

Acknowledging this situation, the lockdown helped the government to gain time to increase the supply of beds, intensive care units, personal protective equipment, health staff, and to improve the infrastructure and also allocate financial resources to the sector. It has also generated alliances between the different health subsystems (public and private) to improve the availability of beds and intensive care units.

Despite the efforts, the number of cases exceeds the capacity of hospitals, the number of health personnel is insufficient, and there is a scarcity of essential supplies. Health professionals and local authorities have recently reported the collapse of the health system in different regions including Loreto, Piura, Lambayeque, Ucayali, Ica, Lima, Huánuco and Arequipa due to lack of human resources and key medical supplies, including scarcity of medicinal oxygen.[efn_note]For some insights on this situation, see here, here, here, here, here, here and here.[/efn_note]

Realities exposed

In sum, COVID-19 has exposed a reality that is distant from what the government and the international news media celebrated at the beginning of the pandemic. In a short period of time, Peru went from being heralded as better prepared to having the world’s worst performance in coping with the crisis. This has been in large part because of deep structural inequalities in Peruvian society, exacerbated by the high cost of austere policy choices that, despite producing strong economic performance according to conventional measures, did not solve the most pressing social problems of the last decades and exacerbated the crisis.

COVID-19 exposed an illusion. A political commitment to redefine the last 30 years of policies is required, alongside an allocation and distribution of resources to make it happen.

About the authors:

Kattia Liz Talla Cornejo lives in Lima, Peru. She has been working as a consultant monitoring a health project aimed at strengthening the COVID-19 response in Ancash, one of the Peruvian regions most impacted by the pandemic. This allows her to observe the critical situation of the health system and the COVID-19 response from the inside. She holds an MA in Development Studies from ISS with a major in Social Policy, and degree in Economics and International Business. She has experience in public finance, policy advocacy and monitoring within the fields of social policy, health and childhood, and has worked in governmental and non-governmental organizations in Peru.

Andrew M. Fischer is Associate Professor of Social Policy and Development Studies at the ISS and the Scientific Director of CERES, The Dutch Research School for International Development. His latest book, Poverty as Ideology (Zed, 2018), was awarded the International Studies in Poverty Prize by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books and, as part of the award, is now fully open access (http://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/20614). Since 2015, he has been leading a European Research Council Starting Grant on the political economy of externally financing social policy in developing countries. He has been known to tweet @AndrewM_Fischer

Covid-19: Increased responsiveness helps South Korea legitimize authoritarian pandemic response measures

By ISS Blog Bliss 30 July 202019 January 2025 3970 views

People lined up at a pharmacy to buy masks in Sejong City. Image Credit: Rickinasia on WikiMedia (Created 16 March 2020).

Despite the South Korean government’s authoritarian Covid-19 measures that have sparked concerns over the possible violation of personal rights, no public protests against the government’s response have been witnessed thus far. In this article, Seohee Kwak explains why, showing that the high level of responsiveness of the government in tackling the pandemic lowers the perceived need for contentious political action.

While the fight against Covid-19 remains arguably the most pressing issue worldwide, protests that express opposition to the government are erupting in many parts of the world. Protesters are mainly concerned about government measures to contain the virus and how governments are handling the economic fallout arising from the slowing down of economies and life through lockdown measures.

In South Korea, the Moon Jae-in administration has done its utmost to contain the virus as well as to mitigate public concerns, and it is often seen as a success case, with infections contained despite an initial surge. South Korea has a strong protest culture, citizens taking collective action when they wish to make political demands. One of the most remarkable examples is the 2016-2017 candlelight protests, when Korean citizens took to the streets to call for the resignation of the president and the protection of the country’s democracy.

However, mass protests against the government’s responses to Covid-19 have not yet materialized in Korean society. A closer look shows that certain governing strategies may have helped this on despite the relative invasiveness of the government’s measures in fighting the virus.

Contact tracing through surveillance

The government has instituted several measures since the virus outbreak, including drive-through and walk-through testing facilities and a compulsory 14-day quarantine and monitoring of inbound travelers.[1] In particular, state authorities have implemented so-called ‘contact tracing’ of those who have tested positive. Public officials have the authority to trace the recent travel history and contacts of those who have tested positive by screening GPS on their mobile phones, credit card transactions, and closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in places visited by potential carriers. Municipalities publicize information on the respective government portal and send emergency text alerts to people’s mobile phones to keep them updated about new cases in their region.

Balancing public health concerns and privacy breaches

The authority to collect and process personal data is guaranteed, if necessary, for epidemiological investigation and in the name of public health. Two government acts, the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act and the Personal Information Protection Act, ensure that data may be collected, but has to be responsibly managed.

Initially, personal information about infected persons was made public, causing social stigma for carriers. Also, small businesses were hurt, since people avoided going to shops and restaurants that those who tested positive had visited despite disinfection measures having been taken. Correspondingly, whereas contact tracing has been made possible by a certain degree of public consent, critical concerns over privacy breaches have been raised.

Moreover, to prevent the spread of the virus, Seoul and several other municipalities have banned people from assembling in some public spaces and religious facilities in the name of public safety. This has sparked condemnations, being interpreted as restrictions to the freedom of assembly and religious freedom. These measures do not correspond to the Constitution of South Korea that protects these rights.

Countering privacy breaches by openness in governing the pandemic

As criticism over the violation of privacy increased, the government adjusted the scope of the public release of information, not disclosing the names of the places that infected persons visited and officially erasing the information after 14 days of their last contact with someone.

In addition, the Korean government has made commitments not only to fight the virus in the name of public safety, but also to interact with the public to fulfill its duty of vertical accountability. State authorities have held press conferences every day or even twice a day. Also, informative press releases and official statistical data moreover are easily accessible by anyone.

South Korea’s balanced approach

While ministries and municipalities have exercised their authority which arguably limits people’s rights, they have released statements that respond to public concerns and correct media reports so as to ensure the public has sufficient and correct information about two key elements: how the pandemic is developing, and how the government is responding to it.

Despite many complaints made both online and offline, the ruling liberal party won a landslide victory in the general election in April 2020, indicating that public support has not been compromised since the pandemic’s outbreak. Moreover, a monthly survey by Gallup shows that 85% (May), 77% (June), and 78% (July) of around 1,000 surveyed respondents were satisfied with the government’s Covid-19 responses[2].

The current Korean government’s Covid-19 measures can be viewed as a balanced approach of strong authority and a high level of responsiveness. In other words, the government’s authority used for the common goal of tackling Covid-19 is tolerated to an extent that people have the low perceived need for contentious collective action.

[1] A further explanation of the Korean government’s response system is available at http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/en/baroView.do?brdId=11&brdGubun=111&dataGubun=&ncvContSeq=&contSeq=&board_id=&gubun=

[2] The report is available only in Korean. It should be noted that the satisfaction rate with the government’s Covid-19 measures is not the same as the approval rating of the incumbent administration.

About the author:

Seohee Kwak is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Her current research focuses on political action and state response in Vietnam. With a geographical interest in the Southeast and East Asian regions, her academic interests include political rights, protest, state repression, and state-society relations.

Covid-19 | Gender and ICTs in fragile refugee settings: from local coordination to vital protection and support during the Covid-19 pandemic

By ISS Blog Bliss 24 July 202019 January 2025 2932 views

ICTs are changing how marginalized communities connect with each other, including those in fragile refugee settings, where ICTs have been used to share information and organize in collective enterprise. This year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, WhatsApp has taken on a critical health function. Holly Ritchie here discusses how Somali women refugees are using this platform particularly in this challenging time and discusses the evolving role of ICTs in refugee self-reliance.

ICTs as fundamental ‘frugal’ innovations, and growing use during the pandemic

Information Communication Technology (ICTs), for example mobile devices and applications, are arguably the dominant technology of our time. From a consumer perspective, ICTs may be considered a form of ‘frugal’ innovation, as they present innovative, low-cost solutions to everyday problems that are flexible and accessible for users with limited resources. If used effectively, ICTs have been cited to be a major ‘game changer’ in human development, driving progress in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and fostering potential gender equality and empowerment.

Beyond basic connectivity, there is increasing use of mobile technology in humanitarian assistance, for example enabling cash transfers through mobile money, and facilitating access to basic utilities including energy, water and sanitation. During the current Covid-19 pandemic, governments and agencies in Africa have started to draw on mobile phone apps for public information and support, for example the establishment of WhatsApp chatbot services. Yet there has been little discussion on the use of such technologies by vulnerable groups themselves that may present both simple and socially embedded frugal solutions which can be employed during the health crisis and beyond.

Insights into Somali women refugees and ICTs in Kenya

My research with Somali refugees (in Kenya) and Syrian women refugees (in Jordan) has explored gender and the influence of social norms in refugee livelihoods.¹ More recently, I have looked at the grassroots use of ICTs by refugees, and links to cultural dynamics in refugee inclusion and integration. On the back of these studies, in 2018, I started a small self-funded project to promote the well-being and leadership skills of a group of 25 Somali refugee women² in the turbulent but well-known economic hub of Eastleigh in Nairobi, Kenya.³ As a trial in digital communication, in the early stages of the project I set up a WhatsApp group to facilitate coordination, despite limited smartphone ownership amongst the refugee women.⁴ It emerged that it was eventually possible to reach all of the women in the group however through either children’s or neighbours’ devices. And whilst the women were largely illiterate, women used voice messages and pictures to communicate on the platform.

Initially conceived as a means of simple coordination, the WhatsApp group soon took on a new social dimension with some women sharing inspirational Islamic messages during special days. Later as the women began a small tie-dye business, progress and designs started to be shared on the platform. The experience of the online group has permitted both a renewed sense of personal confidence and connection in a hostile setting, and the development of new collective agency and economic coordination. At a deeper level, for women that have direct access to smart phones, the technology enables new forms of cultural solidarity between the women, reinforcing identities through sharing of religious messages.

Refugee ICT experience during the pandemic – from health to livelihoods

This year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the platform has taken on a critical health function, as vital health information, advice, and government directives are shared with the refugee group in English and Somali.⁵ This is further shared by the refugee women themselves with close family and friends, indicating the importance of refugee-own networks during a crisis.  Beyond health information, the group has also provided a forum for situational updates and social support, as Eastleigh has faced rising levels of Covid-19 cases, and there have been increasing reports of police violence as malls have been forcibly closed and street trading prohibited. Working primarily as petty traders, the lockdown in Eastleigh has had a significant impact on the refugee women’s (safe) daily work and wages, and households are struggling to make ends meet. Whilst this remains an extraordinarily difficult time, the combined experience of digital communication and physical restrictions has accelerated refugee women’s interest in online business and marketing of their new textile products, particularly by younger group members.

Emerging lessons learnt – the evolving role of ICTs in refugee self-reliance

The refugee WhatsApp group has illuminated various ways that ICTs can boost refugee women’s self-reliance and resilience:

Simple ICT tools can be useful in local digital communication, including reaching poor and illiterate refugee groups (through voice messages/pictures)
ICT tools can permit vital social solidarity and economic coordination and online marketing
ICT tools can also facilitate the sharing of public health and security information, and the countering of fake/false news that is often distributed via social media or ‘on the streets’

In this fast-moving digital world, it is clear that ICTs are playing an increasingly important role in refugee socio-economic lives, although actual usage and adoption may vary at a local level, with differing levels of connectivity, support and access.⁶ Notably, ICTs can also be misused at a local level, with apps being employed to instigate unrest or violence. Further, there may be additional access barriers in refugee settings with clampdowns on connectivity imposed by local authorities.

Despite such challenges, in times of crisis, it is crucial for policy makers and aid agencies to recognize and draw on locally established ICT platforms and community groups to facilitate critical information dissemination, and local exchange and support. Over time, to better appreciate ICTs and gender in fragile contexts, aid groups should consider both physical access to mobile devices, but also links to social norms, cultural ideas (and ideology) and the role of local actors. This will permit a more nuanced understanding of the evolving role of ICTs in refugee women’s empowerment, social protection, and broader integration.

1. Ritchie, H.A. (2018a). Gender and enterprise in fragile refugee settings: female empowerment amidst male emasculation—a challenge to local integration? Disasters, 42(S1), S40−S60.
2. With outreach of up to 100 refugee women.
3. Due to its high presence of Somali traders and concentration of Somali refugees, the district is also known as ‘Little Mogadishu’.
4. An estimated 40 percent of the refugee women had smartphones.
5. For example, health advice from the Ministry of Health in Somalia.
6. Ritchie, H.A. (forthcoming) ‘ICTs as frugal innovations: Enabling new pathways towards refugee self-reliance and resilience in fragile contexts?’ in Saradindu Bhaduri, Peter Knorringa, Andre Leliveld Cees van Beers, Handbook on Frugal Innovations and the Sustainable Development Goals. Edward Elgar Publishers.

This article was originally published by the Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa (CFIA) and has been reposted with permission of the author.

About the author:

Holly A Ritchie is a post-doc Research Fellow at the ISS and a CFIA Research Affiliate.

COVID-19: Should Europe embrace frugality?

By ISS Blog Bliss 9 July 20205 October 2020 3890 views

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The Covid-19 pandemic, emerging in the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, could potentially further shake the confidence that Europeans have in their institutions. Rigid and slow decision-making processes and an excessive institutional reliance on super-specialisation and protocol-driven scientific evidence can at least partly explain why Europe finds it so difficult to predict disruptions and why it adapts its institutional machineries so slowly. Greater flexibility, including space for experimentation and improvisation, can help Europe to adapt more quickly to future contingencies, write Saradindu Bhaduri and Peter Knorringa.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593430915072{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”17580″ img_size=”600×450″ alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593430944892{margin-top: -20px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Europe has offered a historically unprecedented degree of stability, prosperity, comfort and reliability to most of its citizens in recent decades. Many of its citizens have grown to take these benefits for granted, even when all this makes Europe a very high-cost economic system. Two recent disruptions, the earlier financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, are unprecedented in the history of Europe, at least since World War II. The pandemic has caused more than 150,000 deaths so far, with a mortality rate in Europe far exceeding that of countries outside the continent. Potentially, these two events could shake the faith of people in the institutional mechanisms of the continent developed brick by brick over the last half a century, especially if such disruptions are expected to recur more frequently in the future.

Understanding the European system

Few would disagree that the present European production and innovation system, inter-country variations notwithstanding, relies extensively on the super-specialisation of work and an overwhelming reliance on strongly protocolised ‘hard scientific evidence’. Together, they are supposed to uphold quality and transparency in economic decision making, even at the cost of being expensive and sticky, i.e. slow in its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. While specialisation and protocols are in themselves indispensable and desirable elements in a modern economy, too much of it creates its own challenges.

In this blog we argue that the excessive institutional reliance on super-specialisation and protocol-driven scientific evidence in all its decision-making processes can, at least partly, explain why Europe finds it so difficult to predict disruptions and is not able to quickly adapt its institutional machineries in the face of a crisis¹. A remedy in our view lies in reducing over-formalisation in its decision-making processes and creating more space for experimentation and judicious improvisation. These steps can help Europe to adapt quicker to future contingencies².

A discourse which has begun highlighting the importance of such experimentations and judicious improvisations is the one on frugality and frugal innovations. They suggest ways to re-introduce such experimentations and improvisations in innovation processes to reduce ‘over-engineering’ and costs while maintaining basic functionality and affordability³. A concurrently emerging discourse on frugality in policy making emphasises the need for improvised decision making based on seasoned, practical, context-specific experience and the importance of ‘experimenting while deciding’⁴.

Does Covid-19 challenge protocolised hard evidence-driven decision-making?

Indeed, the pandemic struck, and struck hard while the system often continued to wait for a ‘formal go-ahead’ informed by ‘hard evidence’ to be gathered by ‘super-specialised’ actors and processes, to take policy decisions on (i) whether to test ‘asymptomatic patients’, (ii) whether ‘to wear a mask’, (iii) whether it is okay ‘to use hydroxychloroquine’, or (iv) whether ‘to impose a lockdown’. Waiting for ‘hard evidence’ has often been given a priority over also making clever use of readily available ‘soft evidence’ by seasoned practitioners, presumably also not to disturb the comfort of its citizens ⁵^,⁶^,⁷^,⁸. Moreover, this denial to act upon soft evidence is not specific to the context of the current pandemic; it is rather the routine. Incidentally, later more systematic studies seem to validate the soft evidence of wearing masks, and practising social distance⁹.

Is the system adapting?

Going beyond ‘super-specialised actors?’

While Europe initially responded slowly to the arrival of Covid-19, we do now observe quite a few deviations from the routine reliance on ‘super-specialisation’ and formal protocols surrounding innovation, production, and validation. Such improvisations are particularly visible in products and services related to public health deliveries, arguably to ensure their timely and affordable access at the time of the pandemic. Examples include the open-source development of a ventilator, where so-called lay persons can also contribute and participate. Similarly, many informal organisations have sprung up across the continent to produce open-source medical equipment and protection gear for patients and healthcare workers¹⁰. These organisations are not taking the routine protocolised path of regulatory approval. Instead, in order to ensure timely affordable access, they are relying on the viewpoints of physicians and clinical administrators on ‘whether it works’ in the ‘actual’ environment of their use¹¹.

Going beyond ‘protocolised’ hard evidence?

A sizeable section of physicians and clinical researchers of repute have vouched for including hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in the treatment protocol of Covid-19 based, once again, only on soft evidence of clinical acumen, ‘prudent observations’, and targeted, non-randomised, small-sample clinical studies¹²^,¹³^,¹⁴. While the opposition to rely on such soft evidence may be rational, the issue remains that we need fast decisions and therapies to deal with the pandemic, and ‘hard evidence’ of randomised controlled trials does not come fast, nor do they come cheap. Indeed, more than four months into the pandemic, we have conflicting evidence of its (non-) efficacy for advanced-stage treatment. While the WHO has stopped its randomised controlled clinical trial (RCT) citing ‘no benefit’[20], a recent ‘retrospective study’ by the Henry Ford Health System reports significant benefits.[21] For early-stage treatment or as a prophylactic, we are still guided by softer evidence of ‘clinical observations’ and ‘retrospective studies’¹⁵.

The evidence of low rates of mortality in places and countries using this therapy have triggered a diverse set of responses from scientists, politicians, and regulatory authorities¹⁶^,¹⁷. Some of them have rejected it outright due to non-availability of ‘gold standard’ evidence from RCTs. Other responses have ranged from agreeing to conduct more elaborate studies (RCTs or otherwise), to continuing with the therapy based on ‘prudent clinical acumen’. Indeed, an emerging view in this context invites us to explore ‘doing while learning’ by integrating the urge of clinical practitioners to use untested therapies, while designing, if necessary, full-fledged protocolised clinical trials to evaluate efficacy of the therapy better¹⁸. These propositions challenge the sharp division of super-specialisations between clinical research and clinical practice: “clinical practice and clinical research are addressed by separate institutions, procedures, and funding”¹⁹. The crisis has underlined the necessity to adapt this structure.

So, is a new pattern emerging?

Many of the presently successful experiments can be defined as frugal innovations: they are affordable, retain basic functionalities, and are developed through extensive polycentric interactions, involving super-specialised experts as well as seasoned lay practitioners. Similarly, in line with the arguments of the frugality discourse in policy making, decisions are being made by localised, practical experiences of people in the field, focusing more on ‘what works’ rather than ‘what ought to work’, to ensure faster access to protective gear, medical equipment, as well as medicine therapies. Such a process of decision making arguably gives priority to arriving at ‘good-enough’, faster decisions, rather than waiting for a zero-error solution. Of course, we need to be careful here; most of these experiments show that results are contextual, local in their scope and feasibility, and difficult to scale up.

Still, an exclusive reliance on super-specialisation and protocols would hold fort only in an environment where lives and livelihoods are stable, prosperous, comfortable, and reliable. But now that the illusion of a zero-risk and fully controllable society is fading, we propose a more nuanced future orientation that creates space for experimentation and improvisation based on localised knowledges. Recent EU efforts to pay more attention to citizen science and frugal innovation, for example in a Horizon 2020 call, are promising stepping stones in this direction, i.e. to develop rigorous science that is also built on the bottom-up knowledge, practices, and the creativity of EU citizens. This will help make the society more resilient to future contingencies.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177038993{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]1. See for an elaborated account of Europe’s early response to COVID -19 ‘Coronavirus Europe failed the test’, Politico.^{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
2. See ‘Better luck next time? How the EU can move faster when disaster strikes’,Sciencebusiness
_{Last accessed on 10 June 2020.}
3. Knorringa, P., Peša, I., Leliveld, A. et al. Frugal Innovation and Development: Aides or Adversaries?. Eur J Dev Res 28, 143–153 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2016.3 . _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
4. Patil, K., Bhaduri, S. ‘Zero-error’ versus ‘good-enough’: towards a ‘frugality’ narrative for defence procurement policy. Mind Soc 19, 43–59 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-020-00223-7 _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
5. ‘Italy, Pandemic’s New Epicenter, Has Lessons for the World’, New York TImes, especially the section on local experiments. _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
6. ‘Report on face masks’ effectiveness for Covid-19 divides scientists’, The Guardian _{Last accessed on 6 June 2020.}
7. ‘In one Italian town, we showed mass testing could eradicate the coronavirus’, The Guardian _{Last accessed on 6 June 2020.}
8. ‘Up to 30% of coronavirus cases asymptomatic’, DW _{Last accessed on 6 June 2020.}
9. ‘Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis’ _{Last accessed on 6 June 2020.}
10. Digital Response to COVID-19. _{Last accessed on 3 June 2020}.
11. ‘Open-Source Medical Hardware: What You Should Know and What You Can Do’, Creative Commons
12. ‘Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: What’s the Evidence?’, Medscape _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
13. ‘Hydroxychloroquine prophylaxis for high-risk COVID-19 contacts in India: a prudent approach, The Lancet’. _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
14. See ‘He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19’, The New York Times. _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
15. ‘Preventive use of HCQ in frontline healthcare workers: ICMR study’, The Indian Express. _{Last accessed on 10 June 2020.}
16. ‘A Look at COVID Mortality in Paris, Marseille, New York and Montreal’, Covexit.com
_{Last accessed on 10 June 2020.}
17. ‘Coronavirus: How Turkey took control of Covid-19 emergency,’ BBC. _{Last accessed on 10 June 2020.}
18. ‘Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in covid-19′, the BMJ. _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}
19._‘Optimizing the Trade-off Between Learning and Doing in a Pandemic’, JAMA network. _{Last accessed on 1 June 2020.}

20. https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/04-07-2020-who-discontinues-hydroxychloroquine-and-lopinavir-ritonavir-treatment-arms-for-covid-19

22. https://www.henryford.com/news/2020/07/hydro-treatment-study[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177030722{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]This article was originally published by the Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa (CFIA). This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177017606{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1594149888800{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]Saradindu Bhaduri held the Prince Claus Chair in Frugal Innovation for Development and Equity (2015-17) at ISS (EUR). He is Associate Professor at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, at JNU New Delhi, and the Coordinator of the proposed JNU-CFIA Transdisciplinary Research Cluster on Frugality Studies.

Peter Knorringa is a Professor of Private Sector & Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since 2013, Professor Knorringa is the academic director of the Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa (CFIA).[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

COVID-19 | Remembering the ongoing assassination of human rights defenders in Colombia

By ISS Blog Bliss 6 July 202019 January 2025 4073 views

When a peace agreement was signed in 2016 in Colombia between the government and armed forces (FARC), citizens and activists seized the opportunity to make longstanding grievances heard and press for change. But between September 2016 and March 2020, 442 social leaders were assassinated. As death becomes part of the daily discourse, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we should look beyond these shocking numbers and understand that the massive killing of social leaders is not only a humanitarian crisis, but also a threat to the process of social transformation and local empowerment.

Hope for change

The peace agreement signed in 2016 in Colombia signaled change. Since the political exclusion of government dissidents and others critical of the political regime is considered to have been one of the root causes of the conflict, the agreement sought to create spaces to promote the organization and participation of diverse actors with diverse voices and included a series of provisions to strengthen the presence of the state in marginalized areas to address issues such as poverty, inequality, and unequal distribution of land. In this context, the signature of the peace agreement opened a window of opportunity for activists and citizens to present to the state their long overdue demands for changes related to such issues, which had taken the back seat during the conflict.

The persistence of violent repression

In the period shortly before the peace agreement was signed in 2016, a reduction in homicidal violence and conflict-related deaths following the de-escalation of violence seemed to signify the end of an era characterized by violence. This reduction in violent acts provided space for activists and citizens to present their demands to the state in a way that was not possible in the preceding years, when violence made mobilization riskier. However, sectors within the country not interested in peace talks started to exert violence on citizens, continuing a growing trend since 2016. Consequently, during the post-agreement period, Colombia has experienced a dramatic increase in the cases of murders and threats against social leaders. According to figures from the NGO Somos Defensores, between September 2016 and March 2020, 442 social leaders had been killed. According to a recent report of the U.N., which we analyzed in a previous article, these worrying figures situate Colombia as the country with most killings of human right defenders in Latin America.

Assassinated activists and human rights defenders were individuals linked to organizations attempting to mobilize society for the implementation of the peace accords and strengthening of statehood. Those maimed were peasant leaders, environmentalists, land defenders, women, indigenous leaders, and afro-descendants representing marginalised communities.

COVID-19: obscuring intensified killings

This trend has worsened in Colombia during the COVID-19 pandemic, as illustrated by a sharp increase in assassinations of social leaders by 53% between January and April this year[1]. However, as the attention of political leaders and citizens is focused on the response of the government to address the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, civil society groups fear that the assassination of community leaders will go unnoticed and unpunished. As the attention of political leaders and citizens is focused on the response of the government to protect and ensure the health of their citizens from COVID-19, groups often resorting to violence in Colombia (right-wing paramilitary groups, drug traffickers, dissident guerrilla members, and other armed organizations) are taking advantage of the pandemic to divert attention from violence that would otherwise be observed.

As people are getting used to seeing figures of death daily, it is critical to remember that we need to see beyond the numbers and understand that the massive killing of social leaders is a humanitarian crisis with different impacts. At the individual level, the right to life of the leader is violated, and at the social level, the assassinations affect the representation of collective interests, becoming a threat to the process of social change and local empowerment.

Social leaders are the voice of the communities that have been historically forgotten. Hence, when they are threatened, there is a further weakening in the social fabric of these groups. According to the testimonies of several social leaders who were interviewed in a recent study by CNC, CODHES and USAID, after an attack, the members of the community became afraid to participate, to organize, and the formation of new leaders was also obstructed. That is how the killing of social leaders has a long-term effect that impacts the deepening of democracy in Colombia, benefiting the interests of those who want to maintain the status quo and continue to use violence to do so.

The effect of the COVID-19 response on social organization

Whereas civil society has improved its capacity to hold the government accountable with regards to the assassination of social leaders, their capacity to pressure the government has been diminished due to the restrictions on gatherings due to the pandemic, and due to the focus of public opinion on the risk of COVID-19. This makes it more difficult for organizations to centre the defence of the lives of social activists in public discourse and increases the likelihood of the assassination of community leaders being obscured.

In this context, we want to contribute to an ongoing campaign started by civil society groups in Colombia to use opinion articles and other spaces of communication to raise awareness about the severity of this situation and to tell the stories of those who are at risk. As part of this initiative, the newspaper El Espectador on its front page of June 14^th 2020 published a list with the names of the 442 people who have been killed with the title “Let’s not forget them” (“No los olvidemos” in Spanish). Let this become the start of a movement to continue highlighting mass killings of social leaders and to problematize them. It is not okay, and we will not accept it. #NoLosOlviDemos.

[1] In comparison with the number of assassinations taking place between January and April 2019.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Fabio Andres Diaz Pabon is a Colombian political scientist. He is a research associate at the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa and a researcher at the ISS. Fabio works at the intersection between theory and practice, and his research interests are related to state strength, civil war, conflict and protests in the midst of globalisation.

Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo is a lawyer, specialist in Environmental Law and holds an Erasmus Mundus Master in Public Policy. She works as a legal consultant in Climate Focus, where she focuses on climate change policies and forest governance. Her research interests are the political economy of extractivist industries, environmental conflicts, and rural development.

COVID-19 | How COVID-19 exacerbates inequalities in academia

By ISS Blog Bliss 1 July 2020 3824 views

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The COVID-19 crisis has brought to the fore gendered and racialised aspects of precarity that were steeping in academia long before the virus emerged. The increased burden of unpaid care work, still mostly borne by female academics, has skewed research output. Casualised staff, many of them early-career and/or international researchers, are expected to withstand the worst of the crisis, with their job security under threat. What action can academics take to challenge these negative developments? We need a post-pandemic vision, writes María Gabriela Palacio.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593430915072{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”17332″ img_size=”600×450″ alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593430944892{margin-top: -20px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]COVID-19 has illuminated deep-seated inequalities overlooked during ‘normal’ times. As we grapple with the extent and severity of the outbreak, we have been required to isolate and contemplate the cessation of economic activities. The fragility of our systems has been thrown into sharp relief, evincing that it is not necessarily the virus, but the lack of regulation and protection that amplifies inequalities among us.

What is work? What is essential?

COVID-19 gave us a new grammar to talk about what we do and how it is valued: essential and non-essential work. What we now consider essential work is the kind of work that our economies have systematically devalued. Health workers have been at the forefront of the response, with many women and minority ethnic communities at the lower tier of the healthcare system, working in underfunded systems without the necessary compensation and protective equipment. Many do work that is neither considered essential nor ‘work’.

Women’s unpaid work has increased as lockdown measures disrupted childcare provision and increased other care obligations. School and daycare closures have created new forms of stress and anxieties among caregivers (predominantly women), with a sizeable social gradient in the extent to which families feel able to support their children and provide home schooling. Within the academe, the drop in the number of papers submitted by female academics and the skewed distribution of research grants illustrate the increased burden of unpaid care work that women shoulder.

What work is valued? What is disposable?

This crisis intersects not only with gendered but also with racialised aspects of precarity in academia. As the pandemic rages across diverse geographies and international students defer entry for a year, higher-education centres face operational challenges, resulting in recruitment freezes, contracts not being extended, or the scrapping of research projects. Early-career academics on temporary contracts—many scheduled to expire this year—are anxious about their job security. International staff members are more likely to participate in casual employment, often unable to make any long-term commitments as their residency is attached to their work status. The experiences of international and ethnic minorities often go unheard in academia as they are less likely to participate in decision-making: non-white female academics are heavily under-represented in professorial positions across the Netherlands.

These elements show that diversity in higher education has not been accompanied by a change in normativity, with tangible consequences in terms of career prospects. Academics of diverse backgrounds encounter themselves having to working harder to be accommodated in their work environment (to fit in), for example by doing more service work and being less protective of their research time (if any), thus hindering their chances in the labour market. One could consider this a sign of an increasingly fragmented and market-driven academia that fails to recognise differences.

Doing what you love is still work

Most jobs that involve ‘doing what you love’ make it more difficult to assert one’s position and demand better conditions. It is often expected of academics to be intrinsically motivated and concerned about the wellbeing of students—and the vast majority indeed are. Yet, this expectation makes it difficult for us to demand better work conditions, particularly during a crisis like the one we face today. Support and care for students have become central to our online teaching. It is assumed that in the next academic year, most teaching will continue online, supplemented with some on-campus activities.

Though new forms of work are highly welcomed, they need to be accompanied by a reflection on how these new forms of work would be valued and compensated. We need a post-pandemic vision of our institutional setting while we respond to the immediate challenges of online education, casualised employment, and intensified work demands. This is a crucial moment to reflect and raise awareness about how our experience in academia is affected by who we are (e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, citizenship) and the challenges to measure and capture the value we create. What can we do to take action and tackle the privileges and systemic inequalities that this pandemic has illuminated? A first step would be to openly appreciate academics, as an online campaign at Leiden University using the hashtags #staffshouldstay and #koesterdedocent (‘treasure the lecturer’) is doing.

Another thing you can do is to engage in discussions within your faculty and/or programme to discuss how new forms of work derived from the COVID-19 crisis, e.g. mentor programmes, will be valued and compensated. Inclusion is central to such discussions: where would this work come from? Who will be asked? How would they be compensated? Because we as academics genuinely care for students, the conditions of and compensation for this type of work tend to become afterthoughts—and they shouldn’t.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177038993{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]This article was originally published on the Leiden Inclusion Blog and has been written by the author in her capacity of Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Chair of LUDEN: Leiden University Diversity and Equality Network. This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.
[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177017606{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1593467094013{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]

About the author:

María Gabriela Palacio holds a PhD in Development Studies by the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Her research contributes to interdisciplinary work on critical social policy and it seeks to understand how state interventions shape social and political identities. Increasingly, her research interests have expanded to include the study of processes of exclusion within academia. She is the chair of the network LUDEN, tackling racism and other forms of exclusion at Leiden University’s working and learning environment.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

COVID-19 | Ephemeral universalism in the social protection response to the COVID-19 lockdown in the Philippines

By ISS Blog Bliss 26 June 20202 February 2025 6940 views

Since March 2020, the Philippines has implemented one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused severe disruptions in peoples’ livelihoods. The government’s emergency social protection response, the ‘Social Amelioration Program’ (SAP), has also been notably massive, introducing one-off near-universal income protection. It is an insightful case given that the country’s existing social assistance system has been celebrated as a model for developing countries, even though it has been mostly bypassed in the emergency response. Moreover, the country’s highly stratified and fragmented social policy system has resulted in implementation delays and irregularities that have fostered social hostilities and undermined the potential for such momentary universalism to have lasting transformative effects.

The Philippine government first imposed its ‘community quarantine’ on 15 March, which has since been extended until 30 June. Thus far, the pandemic has not been severe relative to evolving global indicators, with 302 confirmed infections per million people and 11 confirmed deaths per million people as of 25 June (although at only 5,760 tests per million people, these confirmed rates are likely to be significantly underestimated). However, as elsewhere in the Global South, the lockdown has thrown the country into an employment crisis given that more than 60 percent of its workforce is informal, most in precarious situations even when earning above the official poverty line.

In response, the government rolled out the ‘Social Amelioration Program’ (SAP), comprising at least 13 different schemes and with an estimated total budget equivalent to as much as 3.1 percent of the country’s GDP [1]. The largest scheme is the Emergency Subsidy Program (ESP), which has been allocated 200 billion Philippines pesos (PhP; about 3.5 billion euros), more than three times the combined budget of all the other schemes.

The ESP was initially intended to cover 17.9 million households, while the other SAP cash subsidy schemes were to target more than 5.2 million individuals. Assuming that none of these overlapped (e.g. only one subsidy recipient per household), the SAP would have covered over 23 million households, or more than 96 percent of the roughly 24 million households in the country. This extent of coverage is effectively universal, representing an attempt to provide basic income support to all but the richest five to ten percent of households.

The ESP initially sought to provide cash transfers to low-income and vulnerable families during the months of April and May, the projected duration of the lockdown. The transfers range from 5,000 to 8,000 PhP per month (about 90 to 140 euros), depending on the minimum wage of the region of residence. This is notably more generous than the existing poverty-targeted conditional cash transfer programme, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (hereafter Pantawid), which provides families with at most 3,450 PhP per month (approximately 60 euros). The 4.4 million Pantawid families have nonetheless been included in the ESP and the amount they receive has been topped-up to the ESP amount.

Despite these ambitions, the SAP has already been faltering. Based on our research [2], a number of problems can be discerned:

Delays and backtracking in the distribution of the ESP. While the ESP was supposed to be paid in two monthly tranches in April and May, the first tranche was yet to be completely distributed as of 15 June [3]. It was later announced that the second tranche, whose distribution only began on 11 June, would only be distributed to beneficiaries living in communities where the lockdown conditions had not been eased – about 8.5 million families – as well as to an additional five million ‘waitlisted or left out’ families, or, as explained by the DSWD, those that did not make it to the list of first tranche beneficiaries [4]. It is not clear whether either of these numbers include the Pantawid households mentioned above or why there would have been ‘left out’ families from a programme that was ostensibly universal.

Vague and fragmented selection guidelines. In addition to this lack of clarity at the aggregate level, the guidelines in the selection of ESP beneficiaries have also been vague and fragmented, which subjects them to different interpretations and discrepancies on the ground. There is no single document that describes the process in detail or provides even an overview. The social registry that is used for poverty targeting in the Pantawid – the Listahanan – was not used for the identification the non-Pantawid families, who constituted 75 percent of the ESP target beneficiaries in the first tranche. Instead, the government reverted to reliance on village-level government functionaries, who have proven decisive in identifying ESP beneficiaries and distributing assistance. This has re-politicized the administration of social protection after years of supposed attempts at depoliticization by means of the Listahanan and the Pantawid.

Failed attempts at overcoming residualism. The SAP reflects an attempt to overcome the limitations of the country’s polarised and fragmented social protection system, even while this system has rendered almost impracticable its universalist impulses. The existing system notably excludes close to half of the population at the middle of the income distribution – often referred to as the ‘missing middle’ [5]. This refers to the 40 percent of employed people working in the informal sector who are not covered by the contributory social insurance designed for those formally employed, which covers about 40 percent of employed people, while at the same time they are not covered by the Pantawid, which covers about 21 percent of the population. The Pantawid beneficiaries are presumed to be the poorest people, although there have been serious concerns regarding its accuracy of targeting, meaning that it excludes many of the poor, while including many who are not (at least, not according to the poverty lines used by the programme) [6].

Social hostilities in the face of systemic confusions. The confused and fraught implementation of the SAP has therefore exacerbated fundamental schisms entrenched within the existing social protection system, including confusions about who is in fact targeted by the ESP and contestations by local government officials over the number of beneficiaries set for their respective cities or municipalities [7]. In particular, given the perception that Pantawid families are prioritised by the ESP (in the sense that they are automatically eligible for the programme), they have drawn public attention and scrutiny, even though they only accounted for about 25 percent of targeted recipients of the ESP in the first tranche. As a result, anti-poor sentiments have proliferated on social media since the distribution of the first tranche [8].

The inadequacy of celebrated models of poverty-targeted social assistance

These confusions and tensions show how the pursuit of genuine universalism within an existing stratified, fragmented and residualist social protection system presents major in-built challenges for advancing beyond moments of crisis. While the Philippines has been able to roll out a massive emergency social protection response to the COVID-19 lockdown, with near-universal coverage of possibly more than 90 percent of the population, reliance on the existing institutional infrastructure has had the effect of fostering social hostilities and potentially quelling support for such universalism among the population.

This is particularly significant given that the flagships of this infrastructure – the Pantawid and the Listahanan – have received huge support from international financial institutions and successive governments for 13 years prior to the pandemic and have been promoted as models up to the crisis, yet they have proven to be utterly inadequate for identifying systemic vulnerabilities at such a crucial time as the pandemic. The enormity of need engendered by the COVID-19 crisis evidently pushed the government to go beyond its conventional focus on poverty-targeted social assistance. As it scrambled to do this, it mostly bypassed the targeted system that had been so carefully groomed and adulated by donors, which has been neither fit for the purpose of actualizing universalistic aspirations, nor politically facilitative for their perpetuation.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#f00f0f” css=”.vc_custom_1593177038993{margin-top: -10px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text][1] https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/downloads/2020/03mar/20200328-JOINT-MEMORANDUM-CIRCULAR-NO-1-S-2020.pdf

[2] This work builds on our ongoing research that we have been conducting since 2015 into the political economy surrounding the institutional evolution of the Philippine social protection system, as part of ERC-funded research project entitled ‘Aiding Social Protection: The Political Economy of Externally Financing Social Policy in Developing Countries’ (grant agreement No 638647). Our current research on the COVID response has been based on deskwork ¬– by necessity given that all three authors have been in lockdown in Europe – and has involved the collection and analysis of official documents (including relevant laws, presidential reports, and other administrative edicts) and media coverage concerning the Philippine government social protection responses to the pandemic, and selective remote interviews with social workers from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) who have been involved with the COVID-19 response at various levels of government.

[3] https://public.tableau.com/views/SAPMonitoringDashboardforEmergencySubsidyunderAICS/Dashboard1?:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no

[4] See https://news.mb.com.ph/2020/06/11/1-3-m-4ps-beneficiaries-get-sap-2-cash-aid-reports-dswd/ and https://www.dswd.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Annex-A.-Media-Based-SAP-FAQs-Part-3-ver-june-1-8pm-final.pdf

[5] Cf. Fischer 2018, 2020; ILO, 2017; Rutkowski, 2020.

[6] The rampant inaccuracies of the Pantawid are detailed in our forthcoming article currently under review. Also see Kidd and Athias (2019).

[7] For instance, see https://www.rappler.com/nation/257316-reinstate-original-beneficiaries-metro-manila-mayors-dswd

[8] E.g., see viral posts on Facebook like this and this, and news reports like this.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal is a PhD student at ISS. Her dissertation is a comparative case study of the political economy of social protection in Cambodia and the Philippines, with particular emphasis on the role of external donor influences in shaping the social protection systems in these two countries.

Charmaine G. Ramos (c.ramos@luc.leidenuniv.nl) is a lecturer at Leiden University College, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her current research focuses on analysing social policy and resource governance, as a means for exploring how political economy dynamics constrain and structure institutions for social transformation and productive expansion in developing economies.

Title Image Credit: Asian Development Bank on Flickr