Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This paper draws on research with a group of Zimbabwean orphaned young people. It explores their experiences of migrating to South Africa during the COVID-19 period when official borders were closed. It draws attention to the complexities of south–south migration in the era of COVID-19 in a way that situates the orphaned child migrants as having contradictory, fluid identities that are simultaneously victimised, agentic and infinitely more complex than the dominant binary representation of adult/child.

An estimated 1.8 billion children live in countries where COVID-19 disrupted violence prevention and response. It is important to understand how government policies to contain COVID-19 impacted children’s ability to seek help, especially in contexts where there was limited formal help-seeking prior to the pandemic. This study aimed to quantify how the national lockdown in Zimbabwe affected helpline calls for violence against children, estimated the number of calls that would have been received had the lockdown not occurred and described characteristics of types of calls and callers before and after the national lockdown. It used an interrupted time series design to analyse the proportion of violence related calls (17,913 calls out of 57,050) to Childline Zimbabwe’s national child helpline between 2017 to 2021. It applied autoregressive integrated moving average regression (ARIMA) models to test possible changes in call trends before and after the March 2020 lockdown and forecasted how many calls would have been received in the absence of lockdown. In addition, it examined call characteristics before and after lockdown descriptively.

The research aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on access to ante-natal and post-natal care services by women of childbearing age in Harare, Zimbabwe. The study used a crosssectional explanatory research design to assess the effects of lockdown restrictions on access to ante-natal and post-natal care services by women of childbearing age in Harare, Zimbabwe. A multi-stage cluster sampling was used to select the study respondents, who were women of childbearing age. The researcher used the structured questionnaire to electronically elicit data from a sample of 384 women of childbearing age in Harare between December 2021 and January 2022. Data were analyzed using a Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS). Descriptive statistics were used to determine the proportion of women who accessed ante-natal and post-natal care services during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Furthermore, inferential statistical analysis was used to assess the level of satisfaction, comfortability, and accessibility of the ante-natal and post-natal care services by women of childbearing age.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had serious impacts on economic, social, and health systems, and fragile public health systems have become overburdened in many countries, exacerbating existing service delivery challenges. This study describes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on family planning services within a community-based integrated HIV and sexual and reproductive health intervention for youth aged 16–24 years being trialled in Zimbabwe (CHIEDZA). It examines the experiences of health providers and clients in relation to how the first year of the pandemic affected access to and use of contraceptives.

The paper explores the COVID-19 ontologies and experiences of children, youths and women in Ward 17 of rural Gwanda South. It argues that the locals have indistinct insights and perspectives on the pandemic. Most of them managed to conceptualize COVID-19 from a “realistic” and “fatalistic” standpoint. Adopting a mixed-method research design that inclines more towards a qualitative approach, data has been collected through document review that was validated with key informant interviews and questionnaire survey.

COVID-19 threatens hard-won gains in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) through compromising the ability of services to meet needs. Youth are particularly threatened due to existing barriers to their access to services. CHIEDZA is a community-based integrated SRH intervention for youth being trialled in Zimbabwe. CHIEDZA closed in March 2020, in response to national lockdown, and reopened in May 2020, categorised as an essential service. This study aimed to understand the impact of CHIEDZA’s closure and its reopening, with adaptations to reduce COVID-19 transmission, on provider and youth experiences. Qualitative methods included interviews with service providers (n = 22) and youth (n = 26), and observations of CHIEDZA sites (n = 10) and intervention team meetings (n = 7). Analysis was iterative and inductive. The sudden closure of CHIEDZA impeded youth access to SRH services. The reopening of CHIEDZA was welcomed, but the necessary adaptations impacted the intervention and engagement with it. Adaptations restricted time with healthcare providers, heightening the tension between numbers of youths accessing the service and quality of service provision.

On the 27th of March 2020 the Zimbabwean government declared the Covid-19 pandemic a ‘national disaster’. Travel restrictions and emergency regulations have had significant impacts on maternity services, including resource stock-outs, and closure of antenatal clinics during the lockdown period. Estimates of the indirect impact of Covid-19 on maternal and perinatal mortality was expected it to be considerable, but little data was yet available. This study aimed to examine the impact of Covid-19 and lockdown control measures on non-Covid outcomes in a government tertiary level maternity unit in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, by comparing maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality before, and after the lockdown was implemented.