Vaccine Geopolitics Could Derail Africa’s Post-Pandemic Recovery

If 2020 was the year of the coronavirus pandemic, then 2021 is shaping up to be the year of the vaccine. Yet rightful optimism about the arrival of coronavirus vaccines belies significant barriers to vaccine availability and access in large parts of the world. Familiar patterns of global inequities are resurfacing as the global vaccination drive gathers momentum. Moreover, intensifying geopolitical competition, especially between China and the United States, is impeding multilateral cooperation on critical issues including public health.

Poorer and less influential countries, especially those in Africa, are caught in the middle—facing obstacles to accessing vaccines, with likely negative effects on their prospects for a smooth post-pandemic recovery.

SURVEYING THE ECONOMIC DAMAGE

African countries need access to large-scale vaccinations to move to a post-pandemic normal. As in other regions, the pandemic has severely disrupted economic activity across Africa (see figure 1 below). For oil exporters like Angola, Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa, the pandemic’s economic impacts exacerbated a crisis that began with the collapse of commodity prices in 2015. Not only did Africa’s largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, slip back into recession in 2020, hopes of a rebound will languish well into 2022. Countries with relatively more diversified economies such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Rwanda—which had some of the world’s fastest pre-pandemic growth rates—have seen a slowdown but not a reversal of their strong economic trajectories. Dampened demand in advanced economies has reduced exports. Travel restrictions have disrupted tourism and hospitality industries in the small island nations of Cabo Verde, Mauritius, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Seychelles. And strict lockdowns since early on in the pandemic have affected small businesses. Migrant remittances for African countries, which are now larger than flows of aid and foreign direct investment, fell by 9 percent—a significant drop, though not as steep as earlier forecasts suggested.

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