Responding to a pandemic: What can feminists in Africa teach us?

What can African feminists teach us about our response to the COVID-19 pandemic? African perspectives point to the need to think about public health responses holistically and through a social justice lens.

Responses to the COVID19 pandemic in African countries are complicated by the complex economic and health challenges largely brought about by (neo)colonialism and neoliberal economics. Yet, at the same time, the histories and present realities of these settings mean that African feminists are attuned to the importance of considering the wider context of health issues.

We are in this together

African feminist research points to the importance of preventing social disruption and building social solidarity - in opposition to many of the individualistic measures in Western public health responses. As Nigerian feminist writer OluTimehin Adegbeye asserts, "Social distancing ... is a solution that doesn’t grasp a reality that is extremely widespread across Africa: people survive difficulty by coming together as communities of care, not pulling apart in a retreat into individualism".

This is a lesson for us all: public health measures focused on individual behaviour change alone will have limited impact. Instead, calls are made for holistic approaches to healthcare. In this vein, horizontal interventions focus more broadly on both prevention and care by considering general community well-being to make it more difficult for rapid disease transmission. Such holistic approaches, importantly, treat public health as connected with other aspects of daily life.

For instance, in imagining how self-isolation might occur in settings where homelessness, low resources, and over-crowding are common, South African public health researcher Manya van Ryneveld states that "this virus will be defeated not so much by hospitals, but by communities acting creatively and responsibly to enable its isolation", for instance through community-run food kitchens and care centers.

Who is 'we'?

The sentiment that "we are all in this together" has been widely expressed in response to COVID19. Feminists in Africa have questioned who is being referred to when we say this. Who exactly is 'we'? They urge us to consider who is overlooked in public health responses, arguing that we need to see the pandemic through the lens of social justice, as an issue of equality and fairness. This means not only eschewing mainstream gender neutral approaches, but also adopting an intersectional view of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and response.

This view is exemplified in the #InclusiveLockdown Twitter campaign. Another example is Nigerien feminist Fati N’zi-Hassane's #SafeHandsChallenge, which highlights the importance of linguistic access and building social solidarity by inviting Africans to record videos in their local languages and share them on WhatsApp family groups. Similar measures for other African countries have been showcased by Medical and Health Humanities Africa network.