![]() They are all experiencing supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19. In the context of East Africa, small scale enterprises dominate the fisheries business. The measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 impacted the fishery-dependent communities and their contribution to the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Uganda produces 100,000 tons of fish, Kenya produces 48,790 tons, while Tanzania produces 13,530 tons. Lake Victoria, for example – shared by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda – is a source of livelihood to communities along its shores. The fisheries sector not only provides nutritional and food security benefits but is also a source of employment and income to millions of people. It is a comparative analysis of the situation in Uganda, which adopted a total lockdown, and Tanzania, which had no lockdown. Our new study focuses on the effects of COVID-19 along the entire fish value chain in the region. Mukasa represents one of many human stories of how the lockdown changed people’s lives in the fisheries business in East Africa. Mukasa did not only lose his primary source of income but also had to compensate his customers. On one of his delivery journeys, he accidentally broke the curfew. ![]() Mukasa had to wait for all the due process of checking the fish, weighing the catch, and selling it to factory trucks and retailers before getting his customers’ orders. They could only reaccess the lake the following day after 6 am, harvest fish and return to the landing site by no later than 12 pm. The lockdown changed everythingįor fishers, the night curfew in Uganda meant they had to cast their nets in the evenings. For fish buyers, the sight of Mukasa’s motorcycle at about 4 pm every day indicated the arrival of fresh fish. One of his fixed tasks was transporting fresh Nile perch and Nile tilapia from the Kiyindi Landing site at Lake Victoria to fish sellers in Mukono, Sonde and Namugongo. He was planning to purchase a second motorcycle, rent it and earn some extra cash with it. Until March 2020, his business was going well. Mukasa provides mototaxi and cargo service. With an average earning of approximately 80 USD per week, he is a breadwinner for the entire family. Mukasa rents two houses for his wives and pays for their livelihoods and his sons’ school fees. He is a father of three, a husband of two, and the eldest among four siblings. The young man lives in Namugongo, a suburb of the capital Kampala. The statement was jointly signed by leaders of the World Medical Association, Coalition of African Medical Associations, Confederation of Medical Associations of Asia and Oceania, CONFEMEL (the Confederation of Medical Entities of Ibero-America and the Caribbean), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and the Standing Committee of European Doctors.Mukasa (33) is a motorcycle transport operator in Uganda whose life changed abruptly with the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. This requires constant vigilance against such abuse and the swift rejection of any attempts to exclude or prioritise individual territories in the work of the health agency.” ‘’We also urge the WHO to resist any undue political influence and to concentrate on its health and scientific mission. “However, we also appeal to all and foremost to democratic governments, to reject any political abuse or undue influence by governments or any other parties in the execution of the International Health Regulations and the technical work of the WHO. This is even more crucial in times of a pandemic. The statement read: “We acknowledge the work of the WHO and its leadership as a technical agency for providing guidance, coordination and support for public health, and we underline its efforts to bring Universal Health Coverage to all people. The physicians from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe in a joint statement also noted that WHO was in dire need of structural reform to ensure its independence from political or ideological assaults. Meanwhile, as the 73rd World Health Assembly begins tomorrow, leaders of physicians all over the world have called on governments not to relent in providing WHO with sufficient funds, warning that withholding funds to the organisation at this time of a pandemic was neither helpful nor safe. World physicians warn against withholding funds from WHO “And actually these times are unprecedented because we’re very likely to be looking at a scenario where figures are going up. “Ever since we started counting child deaths and maternal mortality, those numbers have been going down and down and down,” said Dr Peterson. But the scale of the pandemic means the consequences will be far greater. Such a situation has some precedent – research has shown that in 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, more people died from indirect effects than the disease itself.
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