Our prisoners and the Corona: "A Quarantine Inside a Quarantine."
Oxfam has initiated a great blog focused on Covid in different parts of Africa. It’s many links and contributions are relevant way beyond the African continent - look it up here:
From this blog, just two examples below I would highlight:
From South Africa this contribution really struck me as useful and illustrative of how advocacy can be applied in the context of a corona response: “Covid Advocacy in South Africa’s Shanty Towns – What Works?”. Here Albert van Zyl of IBP writes: “…...The next few days were a blur, but while working on the pamphlet, IBP South Africa and its partners— SASDI Alliance, Planact and Afesis-corplan—began working on an initiative called Asivikelane, “Let us protect each other” in Zulu. Its goal: to mobilize settlement residents to monitor failures in delivery of critical hygiene services and report the problems. To date, partner organizations have enlisted the help of 253 residents from 100 informal settlements in the six largest cities. If the internet and cellphone networks hold up (this is all done remotely), we estimate that in the weeks to come we will be able to ramp up the initiative to include many more settlements. Each week, participants ask the same residents three questions:
- Is there clean water available in your settlement?
- Were the toilets cleaned in the last seven days?
- Was waste collected in your settlement in the last seven days?
IBP South Africa consolidates the answers and disseminates a weekly press release to bring problem areas to the attention of the relevant city agency. When cities are unable to respond, we will engage with the national body charged with coordinating the COVID-19 response."
From Nigeria, OluTimehin Adegbeye of “the Correspondent” reflects on: “Why social distancing won’t work for us” This represents millions of families who can only start buying or making meals when the primary breadwinner closes from work on any given day. For such people, the possibility of catching a previously unheard-of illness is a far less dangerous one than the knowledge that not having anything to eat is always a sunrise away."
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