Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in East Africa, the UN Human Rights regional office, based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has been contributing to the COVID-19 response of UN country teams in the region, by ensuring that human rights protection for vulnerable people is included in their plans.

Our work includes providing technical advice, and input to response plans, humanitarian appeals, development plans, as well as socio-economic analyses of the impact of COVID-19, in coordination with other offices UN in East Africa.

We provide advice for the prevention of stigmatization and discrimination, particularly in relation to healthcare access and testing for those suspected of having symptoms of COVID-19, and we organize webinars with human rights defenders – including women human rights defenders – on the impact of the pandemic on their work, and on self-care.

The work we have all been doing on socio-economic analysis has opened my eyes to how much more we need, particularly in Africa, to get civil society organizations to look at the wider picture of rights: most organizations only focus on civil and political rights, which is vital, but there is a place for these organizations, and national human rights institutions to promote and protect economic, social, and cultural rights as well.

For a long time, we have been pushing issues of persons with disability, but I have yet to see a proper analysis of disability data in Africa either, and there are groups of people on whom we never capture data in Africa, such as the homeless.

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