This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary collection is one of the first scholarly books in the world to address the impacts of Covid-19 restrictions on the Global South.

Bringing together health and social scientists from around the world--including many leading figures from Global-South countries such as Angola, Bolivia, Colombia, India, Kenya, and Nigeria--the book shows how, in low- and middle-income countries in particular, Covid responses often exacerbate problems and inequalities around education, gender, socioeconomics, and politics and political economics. They negatively and disproportionately affect routine medical treatments; vaccination programmes; access to maternity and neo-natal care; child learning and socialization; women's caring responsibilities; gender-based socioeconomic differences; and rates of domestic violence, all while accelerating existing trends towards political authoritarianism and damaging democratic processes.

In offering in-depth perspectives on all these problems, this book ultimately challenges practitioners to include Southern perspectives in future emergency response-planning, and it develops both global and multidisciplinary paradigms to guide them in their efforts.

Aleida Mendes Borges leads the Grassroots Women Leaders research stream at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL), Kings College London, UK. She is co-editor of Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns: Global Debates from Humanities and Social Sciences (2022), and she has authored several other reports and peer-reviewed publications in English and Portuguese.

Toby Green is Professor of African history at King’s College London, UK. His book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019) was awarded several international literary prizes and was shortlisted for both the the LA Times Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. He is also a co-author (with Thomas Fazi) of The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left (2023).

Thiagarajan Sundararaman is Professor and Dean of the School of Health Systems Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India, as well as adjunct faculty at the School of Public Health in Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research, India. He is also a former director, and current member of the global steering council, of the Peoples Health Movement. He has over two decades of practitioner experience and has helped design and implement multiple state- and national-level health systems initiatives, including India’s National Rural Health Mission.