El impacto del COVID-19 en el desarrollo humano

Our world faces a common enemy, COVID-19. The virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or face. It attacks all relentlessly. The most vulnerable, women and children, people with disabilities, the marginalized and displaced pay the highest price. We need to be ready and take on this threat together. UNDP Afghanistan was among the first UN agencies to respond to COVID-19 pandemic when it reached the country at the end of February. We immediately put together a program package to support the Ministry of Public Health with COVID-19 tests and other urgent health needs. COVID-19 was an economic crisis before it became a health crisis in the Kyrgyz Republic. Kyrgyzstan has an open and service-oriented economy. So when neighboring countries closed their doors and borders for business, the economy in Kyrgyzstan started suffering immediately. We were quick in getting boots on the ground to strengthen Iraq's health system and services, especially to address the vulnerable population. UNDP proactively supported Cameroon to face the COVID-19 pandemic by signing key agreements with partners, the World Bank, the Global Fund and the French Corporation. We are signing with the Islamic Bank to help the government support the health system. We worked with central and local governments, community-based organizations and the private sector to donate one million masks, 45 medical ventilators to the National Health Service, and over 400 hygiene and food kits to vulnerable populations. Impacts of this crisis have really been cascading, but this has also prompted Kyrgyzstan, who is a forerunner on digitalization in the region, to invest much more in digital public services. And we see an upsurge of interest in this area. We created the Redaktua network to conduct a digital socio-economic impact assessment, SEIA. We are conducting digital surveys every two months rather than a one-time assessment to allow us to measure trends and provide real-time data to help the government expand social protection interventions. We propose social protection measures in the alleviation of the immediate adverse impact of COVID-19 using a global trade analysis project model we developed for Afghanistan, with infection transmission scenarios developed by the Ministry of Public Health. UNDP, working together with the Asian Development Bank and the government, undertook an assessment of socio-economic impact and vulnerability. And this enabled us to start working with government on economic recovery also beyond the immediate term. This will also help to capitalize new sources of development finance, and in this regard we look forward to leveraging the expertise from UNDP's global finance hub on debt restructuring, debt for nature swaps and green bonds. UNDP has played an important role providing institutional support to the government, particularly in the area of decentralization, to ensure that the government has an adequate response to the pandemic. At the moment we are working in 12 governorates or provinces across the country. We are building isolation units, we are equipping them with much-needed life-saving medical equipment. I have to say we are more used to lockdowns in Iraq. We've always been working one day from the field but another day on lockdown. We are successful because we have boots on the ground and because we are nimble and because we deliver on what we promise.