Post-COVID-19 Scenarios in the East African Community: Implications for Sustainable Development

Abstract

The Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with its lasting imprints on health, livelihoods and economies has plunged the world into complete disarray and staged an interregnum to the momentum of United Nations’ Decade of Action. With some discovered vaccines for the causative virus being administered in some regions, the profound uncertainties are now the virus, its trajectory and the possible post-pandemic scenarios thereof that the world or its individual countries will trickle into. It is unclear whether the pandemic provides an imitable opportunity for futuristic sustainable development or it is a prefatory incidence to an otherwise worse tomorrow. These two (most-pessimistic and worst-case) scenarios have a common thread which depicts uncertainty of the future of humanity. Yet, the most optimistic discourses have undermined the negative realities that global communities predict. This study tables an analysis of the possible global post-COVID-19 pandemic scenarios and trickles down to the same in the context of the East African Community (EAC), (Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and South Sudan). At the very least, encountered reports indicate that global debates on the post-pandemic future are classifiable into (1) the most likely return to “business-as-usual”, (2) a managed transition, or (3) a discernible paradigm shift. For the East African Community, the post-COVID-19 scenarios are poised to be influenced by the new world order reconfiguration; the region’s trajectory to sustainable development in the post-pandemic era is hinged on a solution of a global nature that favors making long-term decisions. Otherwise, the region’s scenario is likely the ‘‘business-as-usual’’ one.