Lessons from Africa’s past to cope with COVID-19

In this roundtable conversation, Post-Colonialisms Today members, Omar Ghannam, Kareem Megahed and Tetteh Hormeku-Ajei, look to policies from early post-independence Africa to tackle issues exacerbated by the COVID- 19 pandemic. Looking at examples from Ghana and Egypt, the authors suggest that self-sufficiency, a main tenet of early post-independence projects, would allow governments to reimagine current day approaches to the pandemic, including as it relates to healthcare privatization, domestic capacity in the production of medicine, and disinvestment from social infrastructure.

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This article is part of the series "Reclaiming Africa’s Early Post-Independence History" at Africa is a Country.

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