Devex Newswire: Are autocracies better at dealing with crises?

The COVID-19 pandemic tested democratic norms everywhere from the United States to Australia, but what about countries where civil liberties were not that strong to begin with? Today we bring you a case study from North Africa on whether the public health crisis also offered autocracies a chance to gain legitimacy. Also in today’s edition: localization by the numbers, the world according to Emmanuel Macron, and Europe’s moral failure on migration. + Join us tomorrow at 9 a.m. ET (3 p.m. CET) for a Devex Careers event to get expert insights on how networking and engagement can help you uncover hidden consulting opportunities. Can’t attend live? Register anyway, and we’ll send you the event recording. Morocco in times of COVID-19 In a pandemic, would you rather live in a democracy or an autocracy? Devex contributor Jacob Kushner writes that Morocco’s handling of COVID-19 has some asking exactly that. In March 2020, three weeks after Morocco's first confirmed COVID-19 case, King Mohammed VI declared a strict lockdown. Nearly all Moroccans were ordered to remain at home. By early March 2021, Morocco had vaccinated more than 10% of its population. In comparison, France and Germany had each vaccinated less than 8%. But that’s not the whole picture. Within days of the king's emergency decree, authorities arrested tens of thousands of people for violating the lockdown. Newspapers were ordered to cease publication. And even the country’s COVID-19 death toll is contested. A study published last year found that Morocco had undercounted its COVID-19 deaths by a factor of ten. Read: Did Morocco's monarchy outperform democracies against COVID-19? Localization: by the numbers We’ve all heard the talk about localization. But what’s really happening on the ground? Miguel Antonio Tamonan from our data team decided to look into what proportion of the world’s biggest aid donors’ contract spending was going to organizations in low- and middle-income countries. As you might have guessed, the results are sobering. In the case of Germany, for instance, just 6.4% of its total contract spending was disbursed by its development agency, GIZ, to local organizations. Want to know how France, the United Kingdom, and Japan are doing? Devex Pro members can get Miguel’s analysis here. Read: How much are major donors spending on local contracts? (Pro) + Devex Pro members can also get the most out of our localization coverage. If you aren’t a Pro member yet, start your 15-day free trial today to access all our exclusive reporting and analysis. Macron-a-thon French President Emmanuel Macron made his annual speech to the country’s ambassadors around the world this week. It was … long. For almost two hours, Macron ranged over the need to update the Bretton Woods institutions, to stay the course in supporting Ukraine against Russia, to reform the governance of the European Union before enlarging it, and much more. We asked Élise Dufief, a research fellow in the Sustainable Development Governance Programme at the French think tank IDDRI for the main takeaways for global development. At the national level: “Macron’s speech outlines a slight revamp of France’s international cooperation: no more ‘development aid’ but ‘social and sustainable investments’ instead. More grants, more financing for LDCs [the group of Least Developed Countries] in particular. Despite a push back to 2030 for the 0.7% target, if implemented accordingly, these announcements outline positive trends, in a context where other European donors’ budgets tend to shrink.” At the international level: “Macron’s speech is a renewed call for essential reforms of the international financial architecture, including on its governance, for a better balance of power. He called on ambassadors to make concrete and daring propositions, the clock is indeed ticking.” But, but, but, Dufief warned: “A crucial missing element of Macron’s speech is any lesson learnt from the way France’s work is perceived by partner countries’ authorities and their population, at a moment where we see very strong pushback on any form of French intervention across the Sahel in particular. No reform of the global financial architecture for sustainable development, and of the French cooperation system, has a chance to succeed in the short term if the basics for trust and dialogue between partners remain broken.” ICYMI: French development chief on how Paris could be a hub for achieving SDGs (Pro) Related reading: Frustration and tentative progress at Macron finance summit A crisis ignored on Europe’s doorstep Journalist Sally Hayden’s recent book, “My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route,” is a harrowing piece of reporting on the deadly conditions in migrant detention centers in Libya. In our latest Book Club podcast with Devex Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar, Hayden discusses her work, and neatly sums up the failed logic from European and international organizations. “UNHCR, for example, they would post online and they’d be like ‘we’ve done a distribution of blankets today, we are so grateful to our partners at the EU who have supported the distribution of blankets in this detention center,’” Hayden says. “But they wouldn’t mention that the people were in the detention center because they had been forcibly put there, basically through EU policy.” In late 2021, Devex asked an EU spokesperson to react to reporting from the New Yorker, which also depicted how the EU had trained the Libyan Coast Guard to capture migrants attempting to reach Europe and who were then indefinitely detained in profit-making prisons run by militias. “Libya has to be seen as a country in a conflict,” an EU spokesperson said at the time. “Once this conflict will be settled for good, then it will be possible to make also the necessary improvements when it comes to managing the migration.” Listen: Journalist Sally Hayden on the migrant crisis the world has ignored In other news A recent report by the International Monetary Fund warns that climate change could intensify conflicts in fragile and war-affected nations, of which there are 39 countries on the list and 21 are in Africa. [Reuters] The Stop TB Partnership announced a historic price reduction by Johnson & Johnson and India's Lupin for their tuberculosis drugs in 44 low- and middle-income countries. [The Guardian] India has permitted some rice shipments to Mauritius, Bhutan, and Singapore for food security purposes amid the country’s export restrictions and pledged to allow some sales on humanitarian grounds. [Bloomberg] Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.