The Impact of COVID-19 on Education, Food & Play-Leisure and Related Adaptations for Children and Young People: International and National Overviews

This report presents and summarises the key results from the first stage of the PANEX-YOUTH research. It focuses on the global and national mapping exercise the team conducted through desk-based research. This was built upon an extensive review of reports and literature on how COVID-19 affected young people and specifically their education, access to food, and their play and leisure. Situating the pandemic both in terms of path-dependent responses and intersectional impacts on young people, the report provides insights into the pre-pandemic context to situate the different COVID-19 specific policies and responses. The focus is on young people, and particularly those living in monetary poor households. It also highlights various types of adaptations, coping and resilience that arose from an overall failure from national and local governments to provide for the needs of vulnerable young people during the pandemic. A shorter version of this report is available as a companion to this extensive document (Andres et al., 2023a). Do email us if you require a copy. This report includes five key initial recommendations. These are preliminary recommendations, with a key focus on pandemic and preparedness for other cognate kinds of crises. These recommendations will be elaborated in the next stages of our research and more importantly final recommendations will be codesigned directly with young people

Ecological planning as an inner-city revitalisation agenda for Harare, Zimbabwe

Background: This article examines approaches for integrating ecological thought in inner-city revitalisation with a special focus on the inner-city of Harare. It is an exploration and possible (re-)framing of the garden suburb approach that is strongly rooted in the garden city concept with the aim of enabling the attainment of the City of Harare Vision 2025 that the city leaders and managers have envisioned. Methods: The methods used to collect data included key informant interviews, field surveys and in depth analysis of secondary sources. Results: Past initiatives in seeking to transform the inner-city of Harare into a vibrant environment proved futile with little effect on the face lifting of the critical space. This is partly because just socio-economic planning approaches were adopted. Conclusions: The article concludes that the absence of ecological planning among other factors of finance and political will explain the non-effect of past revitalisation of the inner-city of Harare. Given this explanation, we suggest sustained inner-city revitalisation that conforms ecological planning to the city’s 2025 vision and beyond