The covid-19 pandemic has had multi-dimensional effects on various aspects of life beyond health. While the economy is what has received most coverage and caused much concern, multiple other aspects have been affected.
This social effects of the pandemic, experts fear, could undo gains made over the previous years in multiple aspects.
Among the consequences of the pandemic has been undoing efforts in poverty reduction where the World Bank estimates that over 500,000 Rwandans could be plunged into poverty due to measures in place to curb the pandemic. This will obviously undo a set of gains made over the years including investments in social protection.
In the health sector, the progress in curbing the pandemic could have left behind a series of disruptions in other health services. The disruptions have been among other things traced to lockdown policies that saw the cost of transport to health facilities go up, postponement of elective interventions while others held back from hospitals for fear of infection.
Disruptions were also evident in aspects such as immunization programmes with the number of children vaccinated for BCG, Penta3 and Polio3 dropping between March and July. Gains made in fighting malnutrition also risk erosion.
With an estimated 3.5 million students spending over 7 months out of school, experts fear that this too could have an effect on learning outcomes as well as widen inequality as some have access to remote learning services.
Such social challenges resulting from the pandemic across most aspects if unaddressed could have potential long term effects on ordinary citizens as well as national development goals.
This calls for a review in strategy whereby as opposed to putting all efforts to resume normalcy, fresh efforts should also go into identifying key aspects that fell back, effects on ordinary citizens and devise ways to regain progress lost and correct steps missed.
This could go a long way to ensuring that the social effects of the pandemic do not follow the affected their entire lives.