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Destination resilience is emerging as an important concept in the tourism management literature. This is because of the recognition that tourism needs strategies to cope with future shocks. The tourism disruptions caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the frequent occurrence of climatic disasters globally have made this need more apparent. Against this background, this study sought to analyse the enablers and barriers to tourism destination resilience in a post-Covid-19 Namibia. Data were collected in 2022 in the Erongo Region, which is one of Namibia's key tourism destinations, and it was also a major Covid-19 pandemic hotspot. A stratified cluster random sampling approach was used to collect data from towns that were grouped into three tourism strata: Tourism accommodation, tour operators, and tourism-related characteristic industry. The study identified several key enablers for resilience. At the individual level, these enablers include intelligence and academic ability, social competence, and self-efficacy. For enterprise resilience, the study findings underscored the importance of having management and staff that are imbued with self-determination to adapt, and the skills to deal with future changes, as well as the ability to collaborate. In terms of community resilience, the important enabling factors were the level of infrastructure construction, access to resources, and the presence of innovative tourism marketing and local people's traditional environmental knowledge. The major barriers to destination resilience were, namely, unprofessional customer service, lack of security infrastructure, insufficient investment in the sector, high tax on tourism products and lack of proper amenities. Given these findings, this paper contributes to the nascent literature on tourism disaster and crisis management in Namibia. It also draws research attention to the importance of small tourism and hospitality businesses as a pathway to foster more resilient businesses in the face of possible future shocks. The study recommends the establishment of appropriate tourism policies that are pivotal to building destination resilience, building capacity to plan and anticipate future changes and investing in durable infrastructure that can withstand economic disruptions and climate-induced shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant remittances has generated a great deal of confusion and debate. This article aims to test three conflicting global and local narratives about the relationship between the pandemic and remittance flows in the South Africa–Zimbabwe remittance corridor. We refer to these as remittance pessimism, remittance resilience and remittance rerouting narratives. The article presents the pre-pandemic background context of migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa, the evidence for a shift from informal to formal remitting during the pandemic, and the implications of the remittance rerouting narrative for other corridors. We find that many Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa experienced severe economic impacts including unemployment, income loss and lack of access to COVID-19 relief measures. We conclude that there was a significant increase in formal, primarily digital, remittances during the pandemic and a decline in informal remittance conveyance. We highlight the need for more research in other remittance corridors to identify similarities and differences between them in terms of COVID-19 impacts and the shift from informal to formal remittances enabled by digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the heterogeneity among households across locations, predicting the impacts of stay-at-home mitigation and lockdown strategies for COVID-19 control is crucial. In this study, we quantitatively assessed the effects of the Namibia government's lockdown control measures on food insecurity in urban informal settlements with a focus on Windhoek, Namibia. We developed three types of conditional regression models to predict food insecurity prevalence (FIP) scenarios incorporating household frequency of food purchase (FFP) as the impacting factor, based on the Hungry Cities Food Matrix. Empirical data were derived from the 2017 African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) Windhoek study and applied univariate probit and bivariate partial observability models to postulate the relation between food insecurity and FFP within the context of stay-at-home disease mitigation strategy. The findings showed that FFP was positively correlated with the prevalence of food insecurity (r = 0.057, 95% CI: 0.0394, 0.085). Daily purchases portrayed a survivalist behaviour and were associated with increased food insecurity (coeff = 0.076, p = 0.05). Only those who were purchasing food twice monthly were significantly associated with reduced food insecurity (coeff = −0.201, p = 0.001). Those households in informal settlements were severely impacted by food insecurity (coeff = 0.909, p-value = 0.007). We conclude that public health compliance should precede with cash or food support to poor households in balance with the need for long-term placement of control measures to fully contain COVID-19 or related infectious diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]