Hi, Quartz Africa readers!
A healthy investment
There’ve been several reminders in recent weeks about the pledge African leaders made to dedicate 15% of their budgets to healthcare back in April 2001 at an African Union meeting. The pledge is known as the Abuja Declaration (pdf). The reason for those stories or social media posts is that few of these countries have come close to matching that reasonable target and we’re all in the middle of a health crisis.
As Quartz Africa covered last week, many African countries spend more on making debt repayments than on healthcare for their citizens. This pandemic is a wake-up call for leaders around the world, but especially for African leaders. It’s not just because they can no longer go abroad to get medical care, an issue we’ve raised in the past, but because they’ve been so thoroughly exposed by this pandemic.
The lack of established, functioning health systems is more than having high-tech hospitals or the same doctor per thousand ratio as much wealthier countries. While a worthy aspiration this was never likely in the near term. But the fact some systems are not even in a position to be helped tells its own story.
As Harvard’s Efosa Ojomo explained all those articles about Africa’s lack of ventilators were well-intentioned but ultimately moot if the African country didn’t have a health system to ready use them. As if to back up that point, a Kenyan
Senate report found there were only 300 ventilators in the country (more than most African countries) but that Kenya has a “critical shortage” of oxygen supply with which to use the ventilators.
A research paper published last month (pdf) from the University of Ghana/Agenda for International Development looks at the correlation between national health expenditure and citizens’ out-of-pocket spending in 44 African countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more a government spent on healthcare in many cases, the less citizens spent out-of-pocket. The numbers also took into account donor spend.
Only nine of the 44 African countries recorded out-of-pocket health expenditure rates below the world’s average which is 19%. A country like Seychelles was, thanks to government healthcare, around 2% out-of-pocket but in Nigeria it was as high as 75%.
The author Gloria Gloria Afful–Mensah writes, if African governments don’t invest in the health sector, “they have no moral right to appeal for donor support.”
— Yinka Adegoke, Quartz Africa editor
Stories from this week
The remarkable resurgence of Ben Enwonwu who was already Africa’s greatest contemporary artist. From the 1940s to 1960s, Nigerian artist, Ben Enwonwu was a global icon. He would be commissioned to sculpt a bronze portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and be named Africa’s greatest contemporary artist by Time magazine. Ciku Kimeria explores his influence on global perceptions of African art and the factors resulting in a well-deserved resurgence in his fame.
The challenge for African countries promoting traditional cures for Covid-19. In Madagascar and Cameroon, there has been a strong push by local leaders for treatments of Covid-19 patients using traditional medicinal herbs, reports Daniel Ekonde from Yaoundé, Cameroon. WHO’s Africa office has been cautious but says it “supports scientifically-proven traditional medicine.”
The Chinese province at the epicenter of a diplomatic race row is adopting new anti-discrimination measures. For weeks, China described viral videos of Africans being evicted from homes and barred from restaurants as misunderstandings. But, as Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu writes, with new anti-discrimination measures, officials in Guangdong province are effectively acknowledging a racism problem and hoping to repair the damage the scandal has caused to its African interests.
A Kenyan-British team of scientists discovered a microbe to stop malaria transmission. A team of Kenyan and British scientists studying mosquitoes in Kenya have discovered that a microbe that lives inside mosquitoes completely stops them from transmitting the parasites which cause malaria in humans. Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu explains the importance of the discovery and how the microbe can be used to control malaria in Africa.
Nigerians are worried a Covid-19 catastrophe is unfolding in the ancient northern city of Kano. Nigeria’s coronavirus outbreak first appeared to be concentrated in Lagos and Abuja, its economic and political capitals. But as Mark Amaza in Abuja explains, a rising spate of mysterious deaths in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, coupled with local politics and cultural nuances, is sparking fears of an uncontrolled outbreak.
African countries are struggling to access Covid-19 test reagents on the open market. African countries are struggling to buy the chemicals and test kits to track the spread of the novel coronavirus through their populations. As Sarah Wild explains, a lack of funds is not necessarily the biggest obstacle to widespread testing on the continent as global demand means countries that manufacture them are focusing on local need.
Dealmaker
•Goodwell Investments led a $3.1 million Series A investment round in East Africa Fruits, a Tanzanian agri-tech company focusing on solving market access inefficiencies in the region. The round also saw participation from FINCA Ventures and elea.
•Instabug, an eight-year old Egyptian startup which lets users report bugs and issues within apps, raised $5 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Accel Partners with participation from angel investors Amr Awadallah, co-founder of Cloudera and Jim Payne, founder of MoPub
Chart of the Week
Ethiopia, once one of world’s fastest growing economies, is seeing carefully laid plans unravel. Ethiopia had consistently been one of the fastest growing economies in the world since 2004, with many millions lifted out of poverty. But as Samuel Getachew explains from Addis Ababa, the largely state-driven economic transformation, which was starting to cool off, is taking a particularly bad hit in the wake of the coronavirus-triggered global economic crisis.
Quartz Membership
Just about the entire planet is grappling with what may well be the biggest disruption in trade and commerce since the Great Depression. Policy makers have fought back with trillions of dollars of spending and lending. The result is the largest experiment in economic policy outside of a world war.
Other things we liked
China’s expensive bet on Africa has failed. China’s streak of billion-dollar investments in Africa over the past decade, including its Belt and Road Initiative, are now at risk given the economic effects of Covid-19 on the continent’s economies. In Nikkei Asian Review, Minxin Pei argues for Beijing to turn those losses into a goodwill trump card through debt relief.
The desperate Nigerian women who sell their babies. Amid ongoing cultural stigma on pregnancies out of wedlock, young Nigerian women are particularly vulnerable to traffickers engaged in the illicit trade of newborns. In The Guardian, Phillip Obaji explains the many struggles Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency faces in its fight to stamp out the practice.
The downside of Netflix’s incursion into African filmmaking. The release of Queen Sono, Netflix’s first script-to-screen African original production, signaled the global streaming platform’s deepening interest to further diversify its content offerings. But, in Africa Is A Country, Tsogo Kupa argues that Netflix’s desire for global reach means local filmmakers will likely have to shoe-horn Hollywood conventions into African contexts.
ICYMI
WTO Young Professionals Program. The World Trade Organization is seeking candidates for its one-year work experience program. (May 29)
Venture for Africa C19 Remote Fellowship. VFA is a new initiative which aims to fill talent gaps at African startups via a three-month immersive fellowship program during which fellows work with startup partners who are hiring. (May 30)
Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program. Up to 90 applicants will receive full funding for graduate degree programs at Stanford University.(Oct. 14)
*This brief was produced while listening to Good Times by Richard Bona (Cameroon).
Our best wishes for a productive and ideas-filled year ahead. Please send any news, comments, suggestions, ideas, lost Ben Enwonwu art and African Covid cures to africa@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @qzafrica for updates throughout the day.
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