Response to COVID-19

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,

239 million people are already undernourished (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO 2021) and agricultural production may contract between 2.6 percent and 7 percent. Food imports would decline substantially (as much as 25 percent or as little as 13 percent) from a combination of higher transaction costs, reduced domestic demand, and export bans in the wake of the pandemic (Ehui 2020).

The pandemic is affecting countries in different ways but straining the social contract across the board. Certain West African countries, notably Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, have learned important lessons from the Ebola crisis and have swiftly executed prevention measures adapted to the local context and that are less expensive than many measures taken elsewhere (Richards 2020). Oil-revenue-dependent states, including Angola, Chad, Nigeria, and South Sudan, have suffered additional fiscal shocks with the rapid decrease in prices due to the global downturn (Campbell 2020). For conflict-affected countries, there are fears of cascading impacts from constrained peacekeeping, hindrances on a security presence, and an increase in armed group activity that, in turn, could increase the humanitarian impacts on vulnerable populations, particularly in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa (Bryant 2020).

In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic has made concepts pertinent to the social contract ever more salient, in particular in relation to the role of the state, the resilience of institutions, and the relationship between the state and its citizens. As social distancing measures have been executed, including stay-at-home and curfew orders, not only has the capability of the state been seen as important but so has the trust of its citizens (Fukuyama 2020). Given that the secondary impacts of COVID-19 are going to be equally if not more harmful to vulnerable populations, good communications, consent, and community engagement will be critical to ensuring an effective state policy response (de Waal 2020). Furthermore, not only are vertical relations between citizens and the state essential, but so is social cohesion among different groups in society (Soyemi 2020).

The pandemic further highlights a number of common development challenges that many African countries face, although they often manifest themselves in varying ways. These challenges include modest growth rates, high levels of poverty, armed conflict, inequality, systematic weaknesses in institutions, and challenges in the delivery of quality services. This plethora of common challenges, plus migration and forced displacement, economic integration and technological change, the climate crisis, rapid urbanization (more than half of Africa’s population will live in cities by 2040), and a youth bulge in many countries (11 million youth annually will enter the labor market over the next decade), adds complexity for policy makers. These complexities often render old business-as-usual ways to tackle development obsolete. At the same time, the fiscal space is tightening and the urgency of expanding domestic revenue mobilization brings issues of governance and citizen-state relations to the fore.