Towards a Comparative Understanding of Community-Led and Collaborative Responses to Covid-19 in Kampala

Abstract

Covid-19 has inflicted a major health toll while heightening socioeconomic inequalities, and its impacts are still reverberating across the global South. For low-income urban residents in the global South, measures intended to contain Covid-19 were often disastrous for livelihoods and wellbeing (Gupte and Mitlin 2021; Sverdlik and Walnycki 2021). Many low-income city dwellers lacked savings or access to emergency relief, thus leading to spiralling levels of precarity and food insecurity. Additionally, Covid-19 resulted in lockdowns that were sometimes associated with rising police brutality, alongside a spike in gender-based violence and other entrenched forms of insecurity. Today, low-income urban residents in African cities still overwhelmingly lack access to decent housing, social protections, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and Covid-19 vaccines that are all essential to manage the pandemic. But Covid’s health burdens are not always clear in African cities (often reflecting shortfalls in testing), while its social, political and economic crises are increasingly interwoven with other longstanding health, economic and infrastructure challenges.