82 Social Contracts for Development
meaningful through feedback to the state and facilitated in-depth participation and co-creation. It enhances the quality and inclusiveness of the process throughout the service delivery chain. This experience is considered to be key to increasing state legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. • Collaborative social accountability has the potential to strengthen social contracts in settings of fragility, conflict, and violence and to support conflict prevention and transformation. The GPSA and its partners have been experimenting with this collaborative approach across the humanitarian, peace, and development nexus, and have begun to produce important operational insights into applying this approach in hard places. The tools and processes of social accountability have demonstrated the ability to address all of these issues and more. Collaborative social accountability can be an avenue for addressing societal grievances and mediating citizen-state dynamics (Grandvoinnet, Aslam, and Raha 2015) in settings of fragility, conflict, and violence. A GPSA-supported social accountability multistakeholder platform in Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan, for example, facilitated direct policy engagement by disenfranchised youth on jobs with government authorities, fostering a sense of belonging.
Response to COVID-19 The utility of the social contract to understanding the behavior of states and citizens has also come to prominence with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has triggered the first recession in Africa in 25 years, with growth forecast between −2.1 percent and −5.1 percent in 2020 from a modest 2.4 percent in 2019 (Zeufack et al. 2020). Because of the economic downturn and the legacy of increased public debt, the fiscal space for states to be able to respond to the primary public health impacts of the pandemic, let alone the secondary impacts of the social and economic lockdown, is limited. Africa paid US$35.8 billion in total debt service in 2018, 2.1 percent of regional GDP. In turn, it is estimated that the pandemic could cost the region between US$37 billion and US$79 billion in output losses for 2020. The impact on household welfare is expected to be significant, with welfare losses in the optimistic scenario projected to reach 7 percent in 2020, compared with a nonpandemic scenario (Zeufack et al. 2020). In a region where roughly 8 out of 10 people are engaged in low-productivity informal employment and often just making ends meet, the livelihoods of millions of households, and their human capital, are at risk. A combination of the pandemic, a locust outbreak, the global downturn, and armed conflict is going to have a significant impact on food security in a number of countries in Africa. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization,
