Lagos to Mombasa: What Have We Learned?

GYUDE MOORE:
Hello everybody. You're listening to Lagos to Mombasa, The Trans-Africa Podcast from the Center for Global Development. I am your host, Gyude Moore. We have had this podcast for about two seasons, and this will be the final episode of our second season. And it's sort of bittersweet, but I think we've accomplished a lot on this podcast. When we created Lagos to Mombasa, we set out to do was to create a platform for the dissemination not just of our research, but also to highlight the quality work that our partners, collaborators, and other actors are doing on the continent. And for us, this made sense. It made sense because Africa has unwittingly become the epicenter of the practice of international development. Obviously, we don't want that title. Nobody wants that title. But the most pressing questions about international development finds stark expression in Africa, and an ever-increasing portion of our research and policy work at the center for Global Development is focused on Africa.

And so it made sense for us to try to create a cohesive and coherent narrative of this research about the continent. We focus exclusively on the continent, its incredible promise, and yet its unrelenting challenges. And we try to explore the policies that create some sort of a bridge between the continent's promise and the challenges preventing the continent from getting there. So, on this podcast, we talked about vaccines. We talked about the pandemic, how to end. We talked about digital ID and social protection. We ask critical questions about how do we reevaluate and rank commitment to development. How do we accelerate investment in Africa? From the EU Africa Summit to the US Africa Leadership Summit and then the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and all of these Africa Plus One Summits? And obviously, as I noted before, this was a combination of the stuff we're doing at the Center for Global Development, but also things that our partners in Africa are doing themselves. This season of Lagos to Mombasa, however, was focused on climate.

The climate affects everything. According to the World Bank, Covid 19 actually worsened inequality. It pushed about 90 million more people into poverty. A majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa. And all of these trends, as I noted, will be more pronounced in Africa. And so resilience in the face of disaster is primarily a function of pre-disaster state. And many African economies were struggling even before Covid 19. They were facing difficulties on debt, we're facing difficulties because of the Trump trade wars, and then the war in Ukraine, and rising interest rates in industrialized countries have not made things any easier. As a matter of fact, it makes things worse. All of this undergirded by changes in climate. More than 110 million people in Africa were directly affected by weather, climate and water-related hazards. In 2000, there was over 8.5 billion worth of economic damages done to a continent that was already the poorest, more than 5,000 fatalities. 48% of those deaths were associated with drought, and another 43% of those deaths were associated with flooding.

This is from the World Meteorological Organization. And even though Africa is responsible for less than 10%, I think maybe historically around 4 to 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the continent is the least capable of coping with the negative impact of the climate. Heat waves. Heavy rains. Floods. El Niño. Tropical cyclones, droughts, all of this having devastating impact on communities and economies. And this is according to the WMO secretary general. In March of this year, the government of South Sudan was forced to shut down schools for up to two weeks because of extreme heat, according to the BBC, deaths related to excessive heat had already been reported. Residents in parts of the capital Juba were without electric fans because the heat had sparked power cuts. This is a city of about 400,000 people, completely empty because temperatures reach as high as 106°F. And then again in May of this year, heavy rains and flooding in East Africa. We saw widespread displacement of hundreds of thousands of people across Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Tanzania.

According to NPR, I mean, there was footage from Kenya of stranded people, some of whom have been waiting for food or to be airlifted for hours. 257 people died. 293,000 were displaced in 31 out of Kenya's 47 counties. Now, normally in March to May is the rainy season in East Africa. However, this flooding in East Africa comes on the heels of five successive years of the failure of the rains, drought. And so, because the earth was so hard, there was no way to absorb all of the water that came out at the same time. So, we've had locusts, we have droughts, we have heat waves, all of this affecting development. And so over the course of the last year, we've had conversations about the climate and its impact on lives. We talked about using space-based assets. We talked about the impact of climate on smallholder agriculture. We had guests talk about the impact of climate and conflict. We had guests talk about the impact of climate on communities, on energy, whether Africa's energy future and the need to transition to green energy is at odds with the continent's need for energy to power its economy.

Our final episode, of course, was on infrastructure, the impact of climate on infrastructure. It is impossible for a single season of a podcast to capture effectively all of the myriad impacts on the continent, but I thought I would just highlight a few from my experience as the Minister of Works in Liberia. We conducted a demographic health survey in Liberia in the early 2000, probably like 2008, 9 or 10, just to figure out what were the binding constraints. What would making it difficult for women to access prenatal and antenatal care? And it turns out that access to roads has significant impact on health outcomes, that in areas where there were no access to all-weather roads, access to health services was terrible. This was one of the first times, at least in our country, where we made a direct connection between the quality of the infrastructure and the weather and the outcomes in health. The second is the Ebola crisis of West Africa occurred in the peak of the rainy season. And as I've said over and over, there were times where specimens so blood samples from suspected patients became invalid on the way to the labs because of how terrible the roads were.

So, what began as a health crisis spiraled into an infrastructure one, into one that was affected by heavy rains and the weather. But that's not the only thing. There were instances where children couldn't have access to schools because of the weather, because it was raining, because lakes, because ponds were overflowing. The point of all of this is to draw this picture of an Africa that is the least responsible for the crisis of an Africa that has benefited the least from the crisis, of an Africa that has the least resilience and ability to respond to the most devastating impact of the crisis. And yet an Africa that is sort of caught up in this. So, what can we take from this going forward? One thing kept emerging in almost all of the conversations we had was the quality of governance, how governments are organized, how resources are used, where. And it's hard to escape this that as we on the continent attempt to resolve the climate crisis, as we on the continent attempt to adapt to the climate crisis, it is not going to happen without a substantial improvement in the quality of our governance.

And this is from local governments and how they respond to regional governments and national governments. At the first climate conference in 1992, two principles were established. One was that there was a connection between human activity and a changing climate. The second was that we were not all equally responsible, that some were more responsible than others, and the assumption of that, some being more responsible than others, was that those who were most responsible for the crisis would bear the greatest burden in responding to the crisis. That has been turned on its head. As we've noted over the course of the season, every aspect of African lives has been affected by the climate, yet this is the continent least responsible for it. And so not only is it going to require a partnership with the rest of the world, how African governments organize themselves, how African governance is practiced is going to be a big part of it. On behalf of our podcast team here at the Center for Global Development, we want to thank everybody, especially first our guests.

We've had 30 guests, and this podcast isn't even possible without them. So we really appreciate them. But also the team at the Center for Global Development, Stephanie Donohoe, Soundeazy, our production team, but especially, especially in my program coordinator and my assistant, my colleague, my partner in this Kia Muleta. I have watched Kia come here and grow into this role. Most of what you've heard from me here on the podcast, most of it is written by her, the research, getting guests on the program. She's significantly grown into the role, and it's almost impossible to imagine running this podcast or doing anything we've done over here over the last two years without her presence or assistance. And so it's been an incredible, incredible journey doing this with you Kia, and look forward to collaborating on other issues. Lagos to Mombasa is available on the CGD podcast stream. Make sure you're subscribed again. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And remember, you can check out the incredible research we're doing on Africa, but in general on development at CGDev.org.

Goodbye.