Overcoming the Setbacks: Understanding the Impact and Implications of COVID-19 in Fragile and Conflict-affected Contexts

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fragility across high and low-income countries. Yet its impacts have reminded the policy community that not all countries are equal in their ability to withstand the pandemic’s shocks. Fragile and conflict-affected countries are generally more vulnerable to shocks from crises and less able to address critical impacts. Such impacts of the pandemic have exposed some of the toughest setbacks to peace and development in decades. This policy brief lays out recent findings on how the pandemic’s secondary impacts are affecting the economic, social, human, political, security and environmental dimensions of fragility to inform ongoing mitigation and recovery efforts.