UN panellists during Global Cooperation for Crisis Response on Friday to discuss strategies and recommendations for mounting response called for robust multi-stakeholder response to covid-19 pandemic.
African Development Bank Acting Senior Vice President Bajabulile Swazi Tshabalala said the Bank is ready to be a partner in coordinated international responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
She vowed that their institution can offer expertise on the ground in Africa, an emerging and critical battleground in defeating the worldwide crisis.
The senior vice president said ‘no country is exempted or immune from the health and economic consequences which are unravelling. COVID-19 affects us all whether we are in a developed or developing countries’.
‘The virus is here to stay and what all of us are going to have to do is live with the virus as an ever-present threat in our lives and in our communities,’ Dr. David Nabarro, Special Envoy on COVID-19 for the Director-General of the World Health Organization
Paul Polman, Co-Founder of IMAGINE Foundation advised the audience to take the dual approach of being ‘physically distanced but also socially more connected.
‘Let us start to think about not restarting the global economy but redesigning the global economy’.
Polman pointed out that societies built on multi-stakeholder models tend to do better in these sorts of crises.