ABIDJAN,
Ivory Coast, May 6, 2021/ -- Around 40 km outside Cape Town, Leebah
Bessick wipes sweat from her forehead as she digs a pitchfork into the
earth at a neighbourhood community garden. It’s an unseasonably hot day
here at Blackheath Secondary School and even a shady corner of the
garden offers Bessick and the other gardeners little respite from the
midday sun.
Still, she finds refuge here these days after
enduring a year of hardship and unemployment caused by the onset of the
Covid-19 pandemic, which hit South Africans hard.
“I learned that
the only way to survive is through asking for help and accepting it
from kind people,” Bessick says. “In return, I’ve learned to appreciate
the little things in life. I try to help out in community projects to
return the favour.”
Bessick, 43, had a fairly comfortable
middle-class lifestyle until the pandemic shut down borders and
businesses across the world last year, including in South Africa, which
has experienced one of Africa’s worst outbreaks. The bookkeeper at a
small financial services firm was first forced to take a pay cut; then,
in July 2020, she was laid off.
The government child support
grant she has received each month as a single mother of three since her
savings ran out, has been a lifeline. Bessick receives the equivalent of
$90 a month – $30 each for her 15-year-old daughter and two boys, aged 7
and 8.
“I didn’t have a lot of money, but I was comfortable.
There was money through the month for things like going to the doctor’s.
Now I’m stuck with the same contact lenses. My glasses broke. I haven’t
been able to change them for a year,” she says.
Millions of
Bessick’s compatriots are in the same predicament as a result of the
pandemic’s twin health and economic crises. The virus has infected more
than 1.5 million South Africans and killed 54,417, according to national
health department statistics released on 2 May 2021.
About 2.6
million South Africans have lost their jobs since the pandemic hit,
according to the African Development Bank’s 2021 African Economic
Outlook report (https://bit.ly/3en9DpM).
Like many financially constrained African countries, South Africa
turned to the African Development Bank to support its Covid-19 health
and economic response efforts. In July 2020, the Bank approved a loan of
around $288 million (https://bit.ly/3ha0kvh) to the government.
The
funding supported the provision of essential healthcare needs. By
February 2021, South Africa had boosted its Covid-19 testing capacity
roughly sevenfold to conduct 35,000 tests per day. In the same month, it
became one of a handful of African countries to launch a vaccination
program, although the rollout has been slow.
To counter the
socioeconomic effects of the crisis, 18 million people, or close to
one-third of the country’s population, have received additional social
grants. This has helped lift more than five million people above the
food poverty line and alleviated widespread hunger. Over 4.5 million
workers have received more than $3.8 billion in wage support through a
temporary unemployment insurance fund. In spite of these interventions,
the conservative estimate of South Africa’s unemployment rate is 30%.
Patricia
Blows, who runs the community garden in Blackheath, encouraged Bessick
to join her in growing vegetables on the school-donated plot of land.
Affectionately known as Aunty Pat, she recalls that during the worst of
the pandemic, people constantly knocked at her door in search of food.
After a while, she said, she could no longer turn them away and that is
how Pat – and the rest of her family – contracted the coronavirus.
“Luckily
enough, it’s starting to get better now,” she said, as the chatter of
young people spilled out into the afternoon air. “But now we must
rebuild.”
Find out more about the Bank’s Covid-19 response (www.AfDB.org/covid-19).
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