Fears grow for impact of Coronavirus on the continent of Africa
by Andrew Carey, CEN:
Last week the UN issued a warning that Africa could become the next epicentre of Coronavirus. At least 300,000 people in Africa could die and nearly 30 million people will be pushed into poverty, according to UN officials. But at the moment, this is all just an educated guess. There has been a sharp rise in Coronavirus cases across the continent with almost 1,000 deaths and 19,000 known infections. And these are much lower rates than in parts of Europe and the US. But because there is no widespread testing it is too early to know whether the lockdowns have been effective or whether the worst predictions could come true with devastating consequences.
In fact, the lockdowns themselves are already catastrophic. These are countries that have extremely fragile and weak health care systems. They have no welfare states, or safety nets and no ‘magical money trees’. As a result, people are losing their jobs and salaries. Farmers are prevented from going to their fields – this is a matter of life and death for many especially in countries where there is food insecurity due to conflict, or drought.
In East Africa, for example, there is already a food crisis caused by massive swarms of locusts that have hit subsistence farming communities severely. In recent weeks farmers have planted a harvest only to see locusts return in a renewed and terrifying surge. In fact, that there are now estimates that the second wave of desert locusts in East Africa will be 20 times worse than the plague that descended two months ago. All this at a time when governments in the region are coping with the Coronavirus pandemic.
Several months ago at Barnabas Fund, the aid agency for the persecuted church, we were planning our Easter appeal. We were focussed on the issue of food insecurity, which has been a growing aspect of our work through ‘Project Joseph’, which is our feeding programme in refugee camps and in many countries throughout Africa and Asia.
Our Easter Appeal was issued in response to the terrible locust predations across a swathe of the globe from East Africa to Pakistan. At that stage, we did not know that Coronavirus posed such an existential threat to the very poorest in the developing world because the medical community was split on the seriousness of the pandemic.
But we quickly became aware of the escalating needs as the effects of Coronavirus reached Africa. Requests from church leaders and from our partner agencies in Africa started flooding in.
We are an agency devoted to serving the Christian community, through Christian churches and organisation with aid donated by Christians and churches rather than government agencies and we are therefore very close to the churches and church leaders. And as a specialist organisation serving only Christians we were able to be far more effective in mobilising denomination networks, organisations and theological institutions. Within a matter of days we had assembled a network of 100 partners from across the world and were then actively responding to urgent requests for aid from many different countries.
The Barnabas Coronavirus Emergency Network came into being and in little more than a week we had distributed more than half a million pounds in aid across 14 different countries – all of this aid was given to poor and, often persecuted Christians from Albania, Armenia and Bangladesh to South-East Asia, Sri Lanka and Uganda. According to the latest update Barnabas Fund has now distributed over £700,000 across 22 different countries to help Christians affected by Coronavirus and food insecurity.
Hendrik Storm, Barnabas Fund’s co-ordinator for BCEN, says that Covid-19 is causing a massive crisis for the very poorest Christians in the developing world.
“The lockdown in many countries threatens the very existence of the church as well as the livelihoods of many ministers and pastors. We are distributing massive amounts of food aid by a network of Christian partner organisations throughout the world.”
And through the Barnabas Coronavirus Emergency Network, we are receiving messages from some of the poorest Christians. One minister in Madagascar described the daily lot of ‘locked-down’ Christians: “Most of the people live day-to-day. Many informal markets are closed, only supermarkets are open during the day and yet things are expensive and not all can afford them. We are in crisis.”
A pastor from Kenya said: “Many people in our country will not have salaries next month, many will not have their daily bread, the rate of crime will be higher, our social support system will be wanting.”
And we also heard from many church leaders about the lengths to which Christians are going to help share their meagre resources. One minister from Rwanda said: “The worst is yet to come for Africa but we are not panicking. We try to share food with those who lost their jobs. We are all afraid that the financial crisis will be severe and it will, but God will make a way where there seems to be no way for us.”
The glaring problem we are facing is that the denominations and worldwide churches have failed conspicuously to support poorer churches. The Christian aid agencies tend not to discriminate in favour of Christians, and therefore often fail to serve marginalised and persecuted Christian communities. Yet, at Barnabas Fund we have found that persecuted Christians are disproportionately affected by food insecurity and by humanitarian disasters like Coronavirus
. And this is because persecuted Christians are already on the margins of society, discriminated against in daily life and often ignored when general aid is distributed. Many are desperately poor already because of discrimination. They have no savings and with lockdown they have lost their entire incomes. In particular, pastors and clergy have no means of support if their congregations do not meet.
One Zimbabwean pastor said: “Sometimes when you are told to stay indoors, you are forced [out] by hunger. Whichever way you are going to die, either by corona or by hunger.”
If wealthy western Christians do not take any responsibility for the needs of their poorer brothers and sisters then who else will do so? Interestingly enough as Ramadan begins this week (23 April), I have no doubt that Islamic relief organisations will be raising millions of pounds of funds to support poorer Muslims in the worldwide Muslim community (‘Ummah’).
This is all well and good. But it is worth mentioning the contrasting picture in the worldwide church. Christians have neglected their own brothers and sisters for too long, in spite of clear biblical guidance that encourages us to “do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers (Galatians 6. 10). There has been no worldwide coordination of aid by the western churches and denominational bodies themselves to support persecuted and poor Christians. And comfortable and wealthy western Christians have preferred not to direct our aid specifically to Christians. We have taken the ‘blanket’ view that Christians should not discriminate and that Christian aid should be universal. After all, any form of ‘discrimination’ means that aid agencies do not get funds from national and international bodies.
Yet there are grounds for discrimination when it is to help those who are themselves discriminated against. And, aid is best directed to those who need it the most. This is why, there is a crying need for BCEN, an initiative designed to cope with overwhelming needs during the Coronavirus emergency, to have a long-term future. When a vaccine has been found and the world moves on, there will still be persecuted and poor Christians. How will we serve them and support them?
Andrew Carey is a freelance writer, communications consultant to Barnabas Fund and a columnist of THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND NEWSPAPER. The views he expresses in this article are his own and not the views of any other organisation.
To find out more about the Barnabas Coronavirus Emergency Network visit: barnabasfund.org
https://www.churchnewspaper.com/81730/archives
See also: Coronavirus: The Story for Africa, by Chris Sugden, Evangelicals Now
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