Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago has been appointed on the Expert Advisory Committee of one of the projects put in place to address the challenges caused by COVID19 pandemic
According to communication from the Lord Mayor’s office, this project is titled “COVID-19 Social and Economic Impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa” under the aegis of Dr. Jack Jedwab, President of the Canadian Covid-19 Social Impacts Network and Metropolis Canada in partnership with UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector.
The project aims at identifying key issues, indicators and socio-demographics in order to generate urban evidence-based responses that address the social and economic dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The project’s Advisory Committee will include prominent experts such as Michaelle Jean, former Governor-General of Canada and former Head of the International Francophonie, and Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.
The Chair of the Canadian COVID-19 Social Impacts Network, Dr Jack Jedwab will lead the research team that will document the situation in nine Sub-Saharan African cities with a minimum of 500 respondents between the ages of 18-65+ per city.
These cities include: Kampala, Uganda, Johannesburg, South Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe, Nairobi, Kenya, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, Dakar, Senegal, Libreville, Gabon and Freetown, Sierra Leone.
The focus will be on the following themes: Knowledge about COVID-19, Fear of contagion, Trust in institutions, Security, Mobility and Discrimination, including racial and gender-based discrimination.
Over the last few months, attention has been raised on the impact of COVID-19 in developing countries, especially in Africa. In the webinar series organized by UNESCO in April 2020 entitled ″Inclusion in the time of COVID-19″, the Lord Mayor of Kampala (Uganda) and Mayor of Freetown (Sierra Leone), highlighted the importance of a whole-of-community approach in addressing the pandemic.
This crisis has simply shown that the already existing structural inequalities, including discriminations, have been exacerbated at all fronts.
Vulnerable groups of women, for example, are impacted more by the pandemic, given the gender-based discriminations that they have already been subjected to in terms of education, livelihood and health care.
However, as the COVID-19 pandemic is recent, there is a general lack of data on pandemic-related phenomena and on evidence-based responses.
In order to fill these gaps, UNESCO is collaborating with these research institutions with the support of its International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities – ICCAR in order to build a solid evidence base that will inform policy-making process in the context of the current crisis.
