Africa COVID19

This session focused on reviewing; the most promising candidate vaccines, the steps in the process from development to approval, and distribution and identify issues for future investigation.

Nurses and midwives are on the frontlines of pandemic response worldwide, but their stories and sacrifices are often ignored. This event will launch frontlinenurses.columbia.edu, a new site that presents first- person accounts of nurses and midwives from Liberia and Sierra Leone who successfully led their communities through the 2014 Ebola outbreak. We invite you to meet and listen to these nurses and midwives via the links to their website below

For the world’s most vulnerable children, the closure of schools due to COVID-19 is more than a temporary evil – it could mean the end of their education. Teachers in the Education for Life program have been trying to maintain contact with students during the crisis.

Understanding the epidemiology of Covid-19 and moving forward would be critical to determining policy on the need to adopt interventions, including the Covid-19 vaccines that are being developed.

There is a need to consolidate global efforts to control and manage highly pathogenic agents like SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19). The legal framework under development by Africa-CDC will address this by assigning government agencies to regulate research activities that include high-consequence pathogens, and to ensure ethical boundaries are not breached.

Physical distancing is a tried and tested method of slowing the rate of infection during a pandemic (without the use of medical interventions). But as we’ve seen, it can have devastating economic, health and social effects, especially on developing nations.

Covid-19 has taught us that investing in health security research, preparedness and responsiveness, nationally, regionally and globally, is critical. For this to work and to beat similar crises in future, effective, credible, altruistic political leadership at all levels of society is needed.

Lockdowns and physical distancing have proved crucial to slowing the spread of Covid-19 in the short term, but looking to the future these measures are unsustainable and have caused a lot of social and economic damage. As the race for the vaccine continues experts are now focused on improving testing, tracing and treatment efforts, especially in Africa, where life-threatening gaps exist.  

Every evening during the early days of the pandemic, people opened their windows at a set hour to applaud the heroic women and men who were putting their health on the line in the fight against Covid-19. In New York, London, Madrid and other cities, it became something of a ritual. For me, it was a daily reminder of those invisible workers, the public health professionals who battle the pandemic behind the scenes. It was also a reminder of how now, more than ever, we must invest in public health.

Finding the balance between limiting disease transmission, maintaining access to critical services and supporting livelihoods is the public health challenge of this century.

Never before has the public had an opportunity to see, in glaring detail, the difference good governance makes. As Covid-19 spreads across the globe, we witness how different leaders address the same crisis. Some have the skills, qualities and appetite required to best guide their countries through the crisis, while others demonstrate their incompetence on a near-daily basis.

Along with the terrible toll it has exacted in lives lost, as well as negative health and economic impacts, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced dramatic changes in how families must navigate work both inside and outside of the home. This webinar brought together a team of experts who addressed issues that are being experienced in the home as a result of the pandemic and provided helpful tips on how to deal with these challenges.

This was the third panel of a three-part panel series hosted by the Columbia Global Centers| Nairobi and Columbia Global Centers| Rio de Janeiro. The purpose of this panel was to bring together experts and community members to talk about their experiences with and perceptions of stigma and discrimination in informal settlements in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and to hear their strategies and recommendations for addressing stigma and discrimination in these communities.

From this webinar on ‘Frontline Nurses: Leaders in Pandemic Response’ you will get to hear the voices of the Ebola nurses, understand their insights, and consider the implications for all of us today in the battle against COVID-19.

This special webinar on 'Africa Confronting Covid- 19' held on April 22^nd 2020 at 3:00 pm GMT was co- hosted by ICAP at Columbia University and Columbia Global Centers| Nairobi together with Columbia Global Centers| Tunis