Africa: Women and Children Will Pay For This Pandemic – Unless We Act...

allAfrica.com

By H.E. Kersti Kaljulaid, President of the Republic of Estonia; Rt Hon. Helen Clark, PMNCH Board Chair, former Prime Minister of New Zealand; H.E. Jorge Alcocer Varela, Secretary of Health of Mexico; and Hon. Graça Machel, PMNCH former Board Chair and Founder of the Graça Machel Trust
 

Wherever COVID-19 strikes, it magnifies unfairness and inequality. In every nation and every community touched by the virus, hard-won progress for women, newborns and young people is being reversed.

This is not the work of the disease itself, but of our reaction to it: resources for essential health care shrink, people fear using health services, and poverty and hunger grow. The problems are compounded by fragile health systems and lack of preparation. A recent study in the Lancet indicates that, in low- and middle-income countries, all these factors could kill more than a million children and thousands of mothers in the next six months.

In the past twenty years, keeping mothers and children alive has been one of the great public-health success stories. Child death rates have almost halved, and maternal death rates are down by over a third. Those gains are now being eroded as inequalities spread, running like fractures along the lines of age and sex, further fragmented by geography, income, disability and ethnicity.

Coronavirus and children: 'I can't hug my mum any more'

BBC

Parents who are Covid-19 frontline workers have had to adjust interaction with their own children.
The usual parental hugs and dining together have been put on hold in order to reduce and possible risk of transmission of the virus.
BBC What's New spoke to some of their children and this is what they said.
Producer: Agnes Penda
Edited by Anne Okumu