By Jane Mlambo| International Monetary Fund (IMF) African Department Director, Abebe Aemro Selassie has predicted that the shock on the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa countries will be severe due to the fact that unlike previous natural disasters and outbreaks which hit a handful of countries, COVID-19 is sweeping across all nations.

In a press briefing held today, Selassie said African countries needed to put extra-ordinary policy interventions to overcome the shocks caused by COVID-19.

He also appealed to Sub-Saharan Africa countries to have more resilient economies to medium-term threat to their economies

“In previous cases we’ve often seen countries that have commodity exporters, or you know, Ebola, those being impacted by the outbreak of Ebola, or natural disasters like Mozambique last year, it’s been country-specific, or impacting a handful of countries.

“Even the global financial crisis really largely impacted those countries that were much more integrated into the global capital markets, into global supply chains, and there were still quite a lot of countries that continued to sustain reasonable growth.

“This time, however, because the shock is so widespread — because beyond the external impact on the region, we are also seeing domestic supply and demand being disrupted — the shock will be, really, quite widespread.

“That’s why to deal with this shock, I think extraordinary type of policy interventions are needed, including the ones I laid out earlier:  very supportive fiscal stance, resources being put on the health aspect of the crisis — this is really, really, very important,” said Selassie.

Then, once the crisis is behind us is when policies can be recalibrated to more medium-term considerations.

I think, going forward, these are going to have to include deep thinking about how to have more resilient economies to the more medium-term threats that our economies face also, like climate change. 

So, how do we build an economy that’s going to be resilient to more detail events, I think, is going to be one of the policy issues that are going to have to be discussed and thought through in the coming days.