Lockdown in Africa - Starvation and Riots, rather than Netflix and Zoom

Imagine being in lockdown, forced to sit home alone, unable to charge your phone or laptop. No Netflix, no Zoom - but it gets much worse. In cities across Africa, such as Lagos, Nigeria, people are facing starvation, violence and riots.

First and foremost, coronavirus threatens mass loss of life, but also risks laying waste to the continent's most promising economies - wiping away decades of painstaking growth and development in a matter of months. Lockdowns have extinguished street side, informal workplaces that provide the majority of the population with their hand to mouth existence.

There’s no digital economy for these workers to fall back on - most don’t have access to electricity, let alone reliable internet. People in western countries complain about tone deaf celebrities demanding average citizens stay inside, as they stretch out in their mansions. But those in developing countries aren’t even being heard - as they desperately try to explain why a lockdown just isn’t feasible.

At Liquidstar we’ve long been working on the ground in Nigeria to help provide affordable energy access to the masses, because we believe that electricity is critical to food and water security, education and health. Our friends, associates and customers on the ground are relaying to us how dire the problem is, citing electricity scarcity as a major factor.

“A lot of people are complaining that they want us to lockdown and stock food stuffs, we can’t power refrigerators and we can’t store food,” our local business partner, Prince Disi Student tells us.

“I got a call from a friend saying they robbed him. The only thing they came into his house for was his food stuffs. They don’t even really want their money,” says another local associate, Damilola Oduntan.

In a matter of months coronavirus has wiped away huge amounts of the work we as a society have done since the turn of the century lifting people out of poverty. This truly is a global epidemic, leaving billions in lockdown. But lack of access to electricity is severely compounding the issues for the poorest and most disenfranchised communities.

Once we've dealt with the immediate health crisis, urgent action is needed to provide these communities with reliable and resilient energy sources to rehabilitate decimated livelihoods and local economies - more so, to move these economies to the next reality of increasingly remote work. To put it into context more than 3 million people die prematurely every year from breathing in kerosene fumes from lighting. This is a solved problem that we could change with the snap of our fingers.

Governments, businesses, and individuals across the globe must mobilize to make sure those that need help most, aren’t forgotten and left to languish for generations to come. Our global responsibility remains.