Lessons from Covid19 in The Gambia
Dr Basil Jones
These are not normal times and Covid19 has exposed the weakness of the Country’s health systems (not that this was not known). The level of government spending on health is far below the minimum recommended by the Abuja declaration of allocating at least 15% of annual government budgets to the health sector. Secondly, the lockdown has shown that the vast majority of Gambians live on “hand to mouth” unable to meet their basic needs as urban informal workers and rural agricultural households. Lockdown and social distancing are necessary to contain the spread of covid19, but the lockdown is also creating economic hardships that can lead to hunger of the most vulnerable.
Informality and vulnerability are extremely high, and most Gambians earn their living in the informal sector either through self-employment in informal unsecure jobs or practising subsistence farming. Self-employed informal workers including street vendors, market sellers, domestic workers, watchmen, bricklayers, plumber, mechanics, hairdresser fishermen, taxi-drivers among others. All these informal sector workers do not contribute to social insurance programs and hence have no protection against being forced to sit at home without income and means of supporting their families. With limited or no savings, they have no financial buffer during this period to feed their families. What is the option for the vast majority of Gambians – stay at home and have their families starve or take the risk to go out a make a living to feed their families. What can the Government do to help?
A key lesson for The Gambia from this pandemic is the need to strengthen social protection systems. We do not have a countrywide social protection systems and nationwide safety nets program to provide the sort of humanitarian relief needed especially during this period of the Covid19 pandemic.
Poverty reduction should have been a priority during this transition. It seems that the Government has not strategically addressed poverty over the past 3 and a half years. We do not know who the poorest 10%, 50%, or 60% of the population are if we want to do a targeted intervention. We have no up to date statistics on the number of people that are in informal employment neither is there a registry or database. It is about time that the Government create a national database to regularly collect information on the poor and use this database to provide income and food aid support to the poor. The existence of such a database will make it easier to provide informal sector workers with emergency income and food support and implement the kind distribution of food and other essential items to poor households.
For too long, an institution like the Gambia Bureau of Statistics (GBOS) has not been given the attention and resources it deserves. GBOS conducts regular demographic and health and other national surveys and censuses that can provide the necessary information on poverty both at the national and subnational level. Planning cannot take place without proper data.
On 27 March 2020, President Barrow declared a state of emergency that included closing all non-essential public and private businesses. Emergency powers were used to freeze prices of essential commodities such as rice, meat, fish, cooking oil soap, sanitizers and cement. So far, we have witnessed the unprecedented kindness of Gambians at home and in the diaspora pulling together as a community to help each other by providing food relief to families up and down the country. In addition, the government is spending D700 million on food items such as rice, sugar and oil for distribution to 85% of the population. It is a welcome initiative during this time of covid19 but what are the methodology and criteria being used to target the population that need this assistance. How will they know that those that need the food aid the most will get the food aid and there will not be some form of elite capture or misallocation of the food relief?
To be able to reach the bottom 50% or 60% of the population the Government need some means of identifying and targeting. In other words, a register of poor in a database, but this information needs to be collected regularly by GBOS. The incidence of poverty in the greater Banjul area is different from that in very rural communities where they do not have roads, water, electricity and the basics of life. Using Local Government Area level estimates of the multidimensional poverty shows that poverty rates are highest in Kuntaur, Basse, Janjanbureh and Kerewan while Kanifing and Banjul have the lowest poverty rates.
The government has been receiving financial support from the international community to complement its budget resources. The list (not exhaustive) includes: –
- D500 million from the budget to the Ministry of Health
- D700 million spent on rice, oil and sugar.
- USD10 million from World Bank
- Euro 9 million from the European Union
- 5 million from the IMF
- 5 million from other Donor Agencies like UNDP, FAO, UNFPA, WFP
Using average conversion exchange rate of D51.07 to the dollar and D56.25 to the Euro. The total funding mobilized so far (not including the grants of medical equipment and supplies from Jack Ma Foundation and the government of China) amounts to a whopping D3.4 billion. So, the availability of funding for Covid19 is not the problem and the government have a once in a lifetime opportunity to get things right and to do the right thing. The objective for the Government is ensuring that the resources address the health and economic hardship challenges and that those who are most affected by the lockdown due to Covid19 get the benefits.
How much will it cost the government to provide income support during this lockdown and state of emergency? (quick back of the envelope calculation)
An illustration as baseline calculation – The average GDP per capita for the period (2016-2018) for The Gambia is $720. Devoting a completely arbitrary 10% of the monthly per capita GDP to cash transfer for everyone would yield approximately $7.20 per person per month. Let us assume the average household size of 8 persons. This will amount to about $56 per household or in Dalasi terms this amounts to D2,856 per household per month.
With a population was 2.28 million (2018) the total per month cash transfer for the whole population will be about $16.4 million per month or D847 million.
The poverty rate in the Gambia is around 50% meaning that half of the population is living below the poverty line of $1.90 a day. This is 1.14 million Gambians. Using the same calculation as before, this amounts to $8.2 million or D418.6 million per month.
From the above two scenarios and for a country of 2.28 million people, a generous transfer would amount to $16,4 million (D16.4 million) and for the 50% of the population living below the poverty line, it will be half the amount at $8.2 million (D418.6 million).
The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have a significant social impact with adverse consequences for individual household’s income security and livelihoods. Food insecurity is expected to increase significantly due to the country’s high dependency on imported goods, disruption to global food supply chains and the associated inflationary pressures.