As health and development leaders try to ensure the lessons of COVID-19 inform how institutions are organised and reformed, how future investments are prioritised, and how policies can better protect people against the multiple impacts of infectious disease, they are taking stock of what caught them off guard.
Recently, Michael Igoe, a Senior Reporter with Devex, based in Washington, D.C. spoke to health and development leaders across the globe, among them our Chief Executive Officer, Dr Paul Wekesa on the global development gaps revealed by COVID 19.
“The reality is that when the pandemic hit, a lot of [international] experts went back home,” Dr Paul Wekesa said.
Dr Wekesa said he hopes the pandemic has demonstrated the value of investing in local institutions — an area where Kenya still has significant gaps, he noted — so that local leaders can emerge as the network for coordination with international expertise.
“I think the pandemic becomes a big lesson in terms of how do you grow local manufacturing for global health,” Dr Wekesa said.
Dr Wekesa and his colleagues did not feel resentment toward international donor representatives and experts when they returned to their own countries, he said because their investments have helped to build a base of local expertise.
“As local experts, we are actually grateful that there has been supportive policy to build local expertise in countries, such that when the pandemic hit, we realized that then this becomes a resource … upon which to base the responses and to enforce some of the responses in our spheres of influence,” Dr Wekesa said.
The pandemic also severed international supply chains at a moment of unprecedented demand for protective equipment such as masks. For Kenya, which depends heavily on imports, surgical masks became “a hot commodity” that was out of reach for many people until the country’s ability to manufacture them caught up.
“There was a lot of repurposing of local manufacturing, such that there was production of some of these essential tools for prevention locally, and that really had a big impact on pricing and on scale,” Dr Wekesa said.
“I think the pandemic becomes a big lesson in terms of how do you grow local manufacturing for global health,” he said.
These commodities were lower priorities for Kenya’s manufacturing sector before, but the pandemic has shown that there is both a market and a clear public need for “proximal access to essential equipment for pandemic response in the future,” he said.
Seeing the mass uptake of these basic health commodities has also opened people’s eyes to the possibilities for large-scale preventive responses to other infectious diseases, especially respiratory diseases, according to Wekesa.
“Nobody had seen the scale to which adoption would occur,” he said.
