Government response to South Africa’s homelessness crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic: lessons for policy & practice

Abstract

When the COVID-19 epidemic spread to South Africa, the government declared a national lockdown, which put a stop to all economic activities. Regulations were drafted to allow only essential services such as healthcare and retail to continue with operations. Everyone in the country was required to stay home, and for the homeless that presented a paradox. The government’s attempt to task the municipalities with rounding up all of the street homeless to quarantine them in emergency shelters yielded mixed results. The largest initiatives, in Cape Town and Tshwane, were unsuccessful and had to be discarded within weeks. As a result, the street population fled the central cities and expanded outward into new public spaces on the city fringes, in the suburbs, nature reserves, recreation parks, and along highways and rail tracks.