BUILDING BUSINESS RESILIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY AMID A PANDEMIC.
When I first heard of Covid-19, in January of 2020, I, like most of my friends and those around me, quickly dismissed it as a passing storm, as a fire that would quickly burn out on its own. As it has turned out, we were all in for a rude shock. Slowly but surely it spread and its impact has been seismic to say the least. Such has been its effect that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic on the 11 th of March, 2020. It has claimed about 4.55 million lives worldwide so far and has bedridden even some of the most resourced healthcare systems in the world. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Its impact has been twofold: health on one hand and economies on the other. On the economic front, the World Bank predicted that Africa’s economy was headed for a recession occasioned by the pandemic for the first time this century. The World’s merchandise trade fell by 5.3% in 2020 as businesses suffered shocks from the pandemic . Financial markets have not been spared eit...