Uganda’s Social Policy Response to Covid-19: Rudimentary Relief Measures

Abstract

The Covid-19 containment measures taken in Uganda have been amongst the most radical in Africa: closure of the borders, a ban on public and private transport, closure of non-essential shops, and a ban on political, religious and cultural meetings. Even before the identification of the first case of Covid-19, the Ugandan government had taken measures to prevent the dissemination of the disease, helped by a solid experience in managing pandemics. Nonetheless, and despite the strong reactivity of the Ugandan government to take firm sanitary measures to fight the disease, the response to the socio-economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic was extremely limited and mainly directed toward the formal private sector. Informal urban workers, despite being the most affected by the crisis, were only targeted by rudimentary relief measures that could be described as humanitarian “band-aids”. Indeed, social protection is still a very young preoccupation of the Ugandan government, but this has to be analyzed within the broader context of the presidential election that took place in January 2021. The incumbent government used the containment measures to muzzle the opposition on the one hand, and to monopolize actions and discourses on the disease on the other.