Southeast Nigeria witnessed the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing public health crises. The crises manifest as the conflicts between citizens, policy-makers and leaders over public health policies, creating the circumstance for innovative research. This study examines the public response to the public health and social measures (PHSMs) implemented by the federal government of Nigeria in curtailing the spread of COVID-19, during the height of the pandemic. The focus is to unravel the underlying factors of the public response to the PHSMs, as well as their implications to the overall public health policies and institutions in the region. Guided by the ethnomethodology model, the authors applied qualitative methodology to the research. In-depth interview (IDI) and focused group discussion (FGD) were adopted to gather data from leaders of religious institutions, public and private health institutions, local market institutions, and state security institutions in the 5 states of Southeast Nigeria. The collected data were parsed through thematic analysis and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). The results reveal a range of problems, such as shallow knowledge and misinformation at the local level, gap in public health knowledge and policy, crises of mistrust and misinterpretation of public health objective, citizens-policy-leadership crises, as well as the abuse of PHSMs. These problems were put in perspectives to portray the lessons and the public health policy implications of citizens-policy-leadership crises.
This study x-rayed the challenges of Agropreneurship development since the outbreak of Coronavirus with views of selected small-scale poultry farmers in Idemili North Local government Area of Anambra State Nigeria. The potency of small-scale businesses in driving the socio-economic growth and development of nations particularly developing nations with emerging economy is incontrovertible. The owners of small-scale businesses are also known as entrepreneurs who are usually faced with challenges (lack of start-up and running capital, insecurity, natural disaster, paucity of business skills, etc.) which affect the business growth or total closure of the business. These challenges have been compounded by the outbreak of Coronavirus globally at the end 2019. The study employed descriptive survey design and thematic method of analysis was adopted to analyze generated data. The study found out some challenges facing the small-scale poultry farmers to include hick in prices of chick, feed and drugs, drastic drop of sales and unhealthy competition in the market from large scale farmers and lack of government support. In line with these identified hurdles, following recommendations were made; concerted efforts by government to avail financial support in terms of easy access to soft loans by small-scale farmers, organization of capacity building exercises to enhance acquisition of entrepreneurial skills by small-scale business owners and regulation of market prices to protect infant businesses.
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