COVID-19, the Global South and the Pandemic’s Development Impact

Abstract

He has worked extensively in Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. His most recent book is the co-edited International Human Rights, Social Policy and Global Development (Policy Press, 2020). He specializes in the European Union's development policy, international relations and economic development.

Infection and Social Dislocation: Wellbeing Impacts of COVID-19 on Children and Young People - Perspectives of Rwandan Leaders

“…The deep underlying generative mechanisms of the (negative) impact of COVID-19 on CAs in Rwanda are the neo-liberal policies of global governance which perpetuate the maldistribution of resources across the world (Hickel, 2017b;Scambler, 2018) and within Rwanda. The Covid-19 pandemic and the responses to it reproduced and reinforced prevailing inequalities in power and economic inequalities (Mccann et al, 2022;Stein & Rowden, 2022). Since the 1980s, international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and major donors such as the USA, the European Union and the United Kingdom have tied foreign aid, concessional loans and free-trade agreements to countries in the Global South, downsizing the government sector, opening their economies to foreign direct investment from investors in the Global North, and exporting raw materials and low cost manufactured goods to the Global North and importing high value manufactured goods from the Global North thereby building up large trade deficits (Langan, 2018b;Slobodian, 2018;Stein & Rowden, 2022).…”