The economic impact of coronavirus are layered, spanning multiple sectors, but the vulnerable segment of the population has felt the brunt of this pandemic.

Since last year as the pandemic ravaged different sectors of the economy and decimated jobs, many workers who live hand-to-mouth have never recovered.

Although the pandemic came with its package of economic pains, it also exasperated the ones that people had lived with for long. One of the basic needs whose deficit the virus brought to the forefront in Rwanda is clothing.

Since 2016 when the government implemented a policy to ban secondhand clothes by slapping a 12-fold tax on their imports, many economically vulnerable households, which depended on them for cheaper clothing options, were left unattended to.

The rationale was to give room for local textile industries to grow, but there was no transitional plan to cater for the clothing needs of millions of people who had been served by the banned clothes.

Households that could get clothes for as low as Rwf500 or Rwf1,000 for their children were suddenly faced with a market full of new Chinese clothes imports that go for Rwf5000 and above. Prudent as it was in the sense of growing local garment industries, the policy ignored the fact that it would take the local industries many years to produce affordable clothes for the locals, even with a slew of incentives they would get from the government.

Many vulnerable households especially in the villages could no longer afford meeting the clothing needs of their families, and it was at that point that the pandemic found them, adding salt to injury.

It is now common to find people in many parts of the country dressed in worn-out or severely torn clothes, from children to old people. It is high time the government did a study about the clothing issue in the country especially among the vulnerable segment of the population.

The momentum around made in Rwanda led to establishment of a number of local garment and textile industries, but an assessment needs to be done to establish how far these local industries have gone in meeting the demand of affordable clothing for the locals. This would inform the government on which further policy actions to take, be it giving more fiscal incentives to enable production of affordable clothes, or devising other means of making sure that locals get what to put on. The only reliable clothing options on the market in terms of volumes and quality for the millions of Rwanda, have been the Chinese imports, but these have also been increasingly getting more expensive since the pandemic disrupted import channels from China. Local garment makers also used to get their raw materials in bulk from China, and since Beijing suspended foreign travellers, they haven’t been able to serve even the few locals they have been serving up-country.

Must like the government and its partners normally step up during times of crisis to distribute food, provide housing for people faced with misfortunes, it is time it stepped up and responded to peoples need of clothing as it is a basic need.