WAEMU Heads of State meet today April 27 by videoconference to pull efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many African countries, particularly those in the western region, have taken a series of health and economic measures. According to an official communiqué, the meeting aims essentially at analyzing and evaluating these control plans “to identify a community strategy to face the challenges related to the needs in terms of equipment and medical inputs [...] the immediate and short-term socio-economic impacts as well as the closure of national air and land borders.”

According to the African Union's latest assessment of 26 April 2020, the African continent, which remains one of the least affected by the disease (but one of the most exposed to its socio-economic consequences) has officially recorded 31,023 cases of covid-19. West Africa, for its part, has 7,744 cases, including at least 3,687 for the eight WAEMU countries.

With the adoption of significant restrictive measures, the countries of the region fear that the economic and social consequences of the pandemic will be much greater than the health crisis. While many organizations predict an increase in the number of poor people during and at the end of the crisis, the firm Bloomfield Investment indicated in a recent report that the WAEMU zone could even see its growth halved by the end of the year 2020.

To date, Côte d'Ivoire, the biggest economy in the region, is the WAEMU country most affected by covid-19, with at least 1,111 cases recorded.

Moutiou Adjibi Nourou