Aid and Development Archive

The first victim in March was Julio Gutierrez Aviles, the president of a local community action group in Campoalegre, a small town in the rural, mountainous department of Huila in western Colombia. Gutierrez had taken part in recent protests to support Huila’s farmers, trying to make a difference in a region that has long been seen as strategic by various armed groups in Colombia. According to local news, he was on his way home when he was attacked by a group of men, who shot him without saying a word and then left his body on the road. In the […]

As a teenager, I watched in confusion as my father, a successful chest surgeon who specialized in infant care, went back to school to gain an advanced degree in public health. This required easing himself out of a job that had always impressed me with its heroics, often literally saving a life or two each week. When my father patiently explained the rationale, I gradually came to not only accept it but admire it, for its logic and even nobility. No matter how hard he worked, in the operating room he could only help a few people each week. But […]

As the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to mount, so does the economic wreckage. Millions more people are joining the already swollen ranks of the unemployed this week, and oil prices continued their historic rout. China’s GDP contracted for the first time in nearly half a century during the first three months of this year, and the International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will shrink by around 3 percent in 2020. Of course, governments and central banks around the world are doing whatever they can to contain the fallout. But will it be enough? For […]

Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador, has emerged as Latin America’s epicenter in the COVID-19 pandemic. Though smaller in scale than the staggering outbreak in New York City, Guayaquil’s is no less devastating. Its 2.7 million inhabitants are enduring many of the same, wicked challenges that New Yorkers have been facing: a surge in confirmed cases, overwhelmed hospitals and mortuaries, and a national government that is trying to look like it is handling the crisis. Yet one thing is quite different: Guayas, the province surrounding Guayaquil, has been placed under military jurisdiction. To respond to the spread of the virus, […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Forty African nations will be eligible for a debt moratorium declared this week by the world’s richest countries. The decision by the G-20 to freeze the debt of the world’s poorest nations follows calls for an unprecedented effort to support the continent’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Demands for a debt freeze had been mounting as countries across Africa have scrambled to find the resources to respond to the pandemic. Oxfam had raised alarms that the world’s 76 poorest countries face $40.6 […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Governments across Africa lodged protests against Beijing this week after disturbing reports emerged from China, where Africans have been subjected to a xenophobic, racist campaign of harassment and mistreatment that is ostensibly aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus. Some African residents in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou said they have been evicted from their apartments and barred from hotels and restaurants. Others reported being forced to self-quarantine and submit to coronavirus tests regardless of symptoms or […]

RAMALLAH, West Bank—The coronavirus came quietly to Gaza on March 21. Two residents who had returned from Pakistan via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt were diagnosed with COVID-19, sending waves of shock and fear across the Palestinian territories. The outbreak started out small in the West Bank, as well. Seven Palestinians who had interacted with a group of tourists visiting Bethlehem on March 5 were confirmed to have the novel coronavirus. Authorities quickly scrambled to implement a containment strategy for Jesus’ biblical birthplace, and imposed a lockdown on the entirety of the West Bank on March 22. Movement between […]

For those still curious about the meaning of gaslighting, look no further than President Donald Trump’s verbal assault on the World Health Organization last week. In a flagrant attempt to divert attention from his own poor performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump excoriated the WHO for alleged delays and dysfunction in its global response. Beyond its immediate details, the episode offered a textbook example of how conservative U.S. politicians curry favor with their sovereignty-minded constituencies by treating multilateral organizations as pinatas and scapegoats during crises. To recap, the president unloaded on the WHO on April 7, first on Twitter and […]

Jean Palou of the Chilean daily El Mercurio interviewed WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, by email last week for an article on the prospects for multilateralism and global governance institutions during and after the coronavirus pandemic. Grunstein outlined the challenges to the international system that predated the pandemic; why global governance still matters, even if it has been hampered; and the major questions going forward as the next phase of this global crisis unfolds. The following is the full transcript. El Mercurio: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called the coronavirus pandemic the most challenging crisis since the organization’s founding after […]

In the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, the odds were never in Taiwan’s favor. An island just 80 miles off the coast of China, it has extensive business and cultural ties with the mainland, where hundreds of thousands of its citizens live or work. The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan just before the Lunar New Year holiday, a busy travel season for millions of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. When researchers from Johns Hopkins University modeled the projected contagion of the virus in January, they assessed that Taiwan had […]

There is no shortage of wrenching details about the coronavirus pandemic so far. But few have been as shocking as the images coming out of Ecuador, where COVID-19 has already exacted a horrifying toll on impoverished residents and overwhelmed authorities. Scores of bodies lie on sidewalks and city streets, as the relatives of the dead plead for help. Ecuador’s Guayas province has emerged as ground zero for the coronavirus in South America, with more cases reported there than in many Latin American countries as a whole. Its capital, the Pacific port city of Guayaquil, is the country’s most populous metropolitan […]

Cuba has long promoted its high-quality health care system by sending medical professionals to treat patients in other countries, “a show of soft power that also earns billions in badly needed hard currency,” as the Associated Press recently put it. While some right-wing governments in Latin America have sent their Cuban doctors packing in recent years, Havana is seeing a new surge in demand for its help as a result of the spread of COVID-19. In an email interview with WPR, John Kirk, a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, discusses Cuba’s […]

Editor’s Note: WPR has made this article, as well as a selection of others from our COVID-19 coverage that we consider to be in the public interest, freely available. You can find all of our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here. If you would like to help support our work, please consider taking advantage of our subscription offer here. The Chinese government first reported “cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology” to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31, 2019. A week later, the new virus responsible for the disease outbreak was identified. Less than 100 days later, we no longer […]

As the world grapples with COVID-19, it cannot afford to ignore an even more serious global emergency that will persist long after the pandemic has passed: climate change. Last month, the United Nations issued a dire multiagency report warning that the world is “way off track” on its commitments to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement. Without dramatic and sustained emissions reductions, higher atmospheric and marine temperatures will bring more deadly heat waves, catastrophic storms, rising seas, food insecurity, health crises and mass displacement. Although emissions have dropped sharply since January with the coronavirus pandemic virtually shutting down entire economies […]

Political leaders around the world have responded to the coronavirus pandemic in a wide variety of ways. Some are strictly adhering to the advice of epidemiologists, like the presidents of South Korea and Taiwan. Others are brazenly launching autocratic power grabs, in the case of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban. Still others are to trying to deny reality itself, as in Turkmenistan, where the government has banned the word “coronavirus.” In Latin America, the responses from national leaders have ranged from buffoonish irresponsibility to stern action. The region is a good place to try to identify what it is about […]

Editor’s Note: You can find all of our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here. If you would like to help support our work, please consider taking advantage of our subscription offer here. With a third of the global population on lockdown amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 40,000 people as of March 31, governments are rightfully thinking about how to make it easier for their citizens to stay home and reduce activities that are likely to further spread the disease. The restrictions on movement, while important for public health reasons, mean that millions of workers are losing […]