Strengthening community resilience for pandemic preparedness in the Western Cape, South Africa

The aims of the project are to address these critical gaps to inform lasting policy change in South Africa (RSA) and for preparedness more widely, through our team’s embedded transdisciplinary relationships across scales.
Project status
Ongoing
Departments
International

The experience of Covid-19 has catalysed policy interest in community-based responses and ‘community resilience’ to the health and wider societal impacts of pandemics. However, understandings of resilience in policy use is unclear and there are also significant gaps in knowledge related to community-based responses. Our research draws on the idea of social and care infrastructures, understood as the formal and informal structures (social, political and economic) that communities draw upon to meet their basic needs. We will explore the lived experiences of COVID-19 and the ‘whole of society’ impacts in informal settlements in the Western Cape province of South Africa, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of a range of community-based support initiatives, as well as quantitative indicators of societal distress across different vulnerabilities. We will ask what these suggest about resilience, for different people and infrastructures across timescales, and how future preparedness policy can best support it.

Research Team: Professor Hayley MacGregor, Institute of Development Studies; Dr Mercy Brown-Luthango, University of Cape Town; Professor Andrew Boulle, University of Cape Town; Professor Mary-Ann Davies, University of Cape Town; Dr Gareth Haysom, University of Cape Town; Professor Nicholas Nisbett, Institute of Development Studies

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