Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes
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Publication
Key Ingredients to Women’s Legal Rights in Kenya
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-03-24)Legislative reforms to increase gender equality before the law are often long and complex processes. This brief focuses on a series of reforms in Kenya, specifically, the adoption of the Sexual Offenses Act of 2006, the Employment Act of 2007, and the Protection Against Domestic Violence Act of 2015. Strong evidence, broad coalitions, and incorporating the highest standards based on international best practice in early legal drafts are singled out as the key elements that led to the successful adoption of these landmark laws promoting women’s rights in Kenya. The lessons in this brief can provide important insights for policy makers, advocacy groups and international organizations involved in the pursuit of legal gender equality in Kenya and other countries. -
Publication
Social Assistance Programs and Household Welfare in Eswatini: Study Brief
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12-17)This study brief on “Social Assistance Programs and Household Welfare in Eswatini” examines the performance of Eswatini’s main social assistance programs. These programs employ varying combinations of categorical and self-targeting to reach the poor and vulnerable. -
Publication
Somalia: COVID-19 High Phone Survey Wave 2 Brief
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11)In January 2021, the second wave of the Somalia high frequency phone survey has been administered, calling 2,811 households to see the impact of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on people’s behavior and livelihood. The first wave has been conducted in June 2020, and compared to that, the adoption of preventive measures such as washing hands and wearing mask was less widespread in the second wave, while over 90 percent of people expressed interest in getting tested and vaccinated. The overall employment rate seems to have improved from the first wave, but still the majority of households (79 percent) reported the further income reduction. Food insecurity has clearly worsened compared to the first wave while government and non-government assistance appears to have reduced greatly since 2020, which strongly suggests the need of further support to the Somalis, especially the most vulnerable groups including internally displaced populations (IDPs) and nomadic households. -
Publication
One Year in the Pandemic: Results from the High-Frequency Phone Surveys for Refugees in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-28)The URHFPS tracks the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on refugees. The World Bank (WB) in collaboration with the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched and conducted the URHFPS. The URHFPS tracked the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic between October 2020 and March 2021. This brief discusses key selected results while providing policy options. Where possible and appropriate, findings are compared to Ugandans by using the national High-Frequency Phone Survey (UHFPS) conducted by UBOS with the support from the World Bank since June 2020. -
Publication
Gender Implications of Rural Land Use Fee and Agricultural Income Tax in Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)Land use fees and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia are levied on rural landholders according to the size of agricultural landholdings. Summarizing the evidence presented in the authors paper based on new, nationally-representative data on taxation of households and individual landholdings and rights in the Fourth Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey, this brief discusses how area-based land taxes are regressive and the tax burdens for female-only households are larger than for dual-adult households. Social norms limiting women’s roles in agriculture and a gender agricultural productivity gap are likely to be a source of this gender bias. Lower tax rates for smallholders can reduce women’s tax burdens, but area-based land taxation would continue to be regressive. -
Publication
Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19 in Kenya
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a strong impact on the livelihoods of Kenyan households, even though employment and income levels are recovering. The second lockdown resulted in another surge in food insecurity. While access to education worsened again due to renewed school closures, health services remained widely accessible to the population. Kenyans are well informed about the preventive measures to avoid COVID-19 infections, and compliance with hygiene measures against the virus increased again during the second lockdown. The majority of Kenyans will be willing to take a COVID-19 vaccine, but many are concerned about potential side effects. One-half of the Kenyan population is anxious due to the fear of contracting COVID-19 and potential employment losses. This brief summarizes the key results of the Kenya COVID-19 rapid response phone survey (RRPS) tracking the socioeconomic impacts of the crisis from May 2020 to June 2021. -
Publication
Monitoring the Impact of COVID-19 on Firms in Zambia: Results from Two Rounds of World Bank Enterprise Survey Follow-ups on COVID-19
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-05)The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its negative economic effects create a need for timely data and evidence to help monitor and mitigate the social and economic impacts of the crisis. To monitor the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and related containment measures on formal firms in Zambia and to inform the policy response, the World Bank is implementing several rounds of phone-based surveys of firms. The surveys in Zambia are follow-ons from the baseline enterprise survey that was conducted in Zambia immediately prior to the pandemic. These phone surveys allow for a better understanding of the effects of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on firm operations, hiring and firing, and expectations of future operations and labor demand in order to better tailor and implement interventions and policy responses and monitor their effects. This note summarizes the results of round 2 (R2) of the survey, conducted between December 19, 2020 and February 18, 2021. The information presented in this report is based on the sample of 570 firms that responded to both round 1 (R1) and round 2 (R2) surveys. -
Publication
Who is Disabled in Sub-Saharan Africa?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04)Despite significant recent advances in research on people with disabilities in many developed countries, little is known about their counterparts living in the developing world. With the goal of helping to improve the state of knowledge on disability, the United Nations commissioned the Washington Group to develop a short set of questions to measure disability in official household surveys. This note uses the resulting data from ten recent surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to profile the characteristics of people with disabilities, briefly describing their welfare, gender, age, geographic characteristics, educational attainment, and labor force participation. -
Publication
COVID-19 Impact Monitoring at the Household Level: Burkina Faso, Brief No. 7
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03)This note presents the results of the seventh round of a nationally representative telephone survey (HFPS). The BFA Covid-19 (coronavirus) HFPS - Round 7 was administered between February 12 and March 2, 2021. The following modules were administered during the 7th visit: Access to basic services; Employment and income; Food Safety; Mental health, and Social protection. In addition to the 1985 households successfully interviewed in the sixth round, in an effort to maintain sample size, additional 47 households that had not been successfully interviewed in previous rounds but did not refuse to participate in the survey were called in this seventh round. 18 households were excluded from the sample as they refused to participate in Round 6, and 21 were excluded as they weren’t contacted in the past three consecutive rounds. 1994 households (98.13 percent of the 2,032 attempted) were contacted and 1,979 (97.39 percent) were successfully interviewed. 13 households refused outright to be interviewed. For the sake of simplicity, this note focuses on modules related to mental health, employment dynamics, and social protection. -
Publication
COVID-19 Impact Monitoring at the Household Level: Burkina Faso, Brief No. 5
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-01)This note presents the results of the fifth round of a nationally re presentative telephone survey ( HFPS). Data collection took place between December 9 and December 30,2020. In addition to the 2,011 households successfully interviewed in the fourth round, in an effort to maintain sample size, additional 84 households that had not been successfully interviewed in previous rounds but did not ref use to participate in the survey were called in this fifth round. 9 households were excluded from the sample of Round 5 as they ref used to participate in Round 4. 1,968 households (93.9 4 percent of the 2,095 attempted) w ere contacted and 1,944 (92.79 percent) were successfully interviewed in Round 5. Of those contacted, 24 households ref used outright to be interviewed. The questionnaire includes key modules that had already been administered in previous rounds, namely, access to food and health services, employment and income, and shocks. Major additions were made to the questionnaire: (i) a module on Covid-19 (coronavirus) testing and vaccination; (ii) expansion of the education module to cover the resumption of classes and get an idea of the impact of Covid-19 on school attendance. For the sake of simplicity, this note focuses on these two new themes.