Limiting the effects of the pandemic on Africa requires an urgent global response. The international community must provide support in ways that strengthen, rather than undermine, Africans’ freedoms.

Although PPPs do have significant merits they can, however, also mask conflicts and power inequalities. It is therefore crucial that PPPs, their impacts and consequences are subject to careful academic scrutiny.

An effective response to a global health crisis of this nature – which straddles the priorities of humanitarian, development and peacebuilding actors – demands a joined-up or ‘nexus’ response.

Will the world after Covid-19 be “Fortress Earth” or societies transformed? Whatever you might be thinking about the long-term impacts of the coronavirus epidemic, you’re probably not thinking big enough.