Publication: Shocks and Household Welfare in Sudan
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Published
2019-10
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Date
2021-08-11
Author(s)
Touray, Sering
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Abstract
The Sudanese economy has faced several shocks over the years, sometimes resulting in devastating impacts on the economy and the welfare of Sudanese households. The sources of these shocks vary, ranging from weather-related shocks such as droughts and floods to the global financial crisis and commodity price hikes. In the absence of effective social protection programs, exposure of households to frequent shocks lowers their ability to escape poverty, pushing households slightly above the poverty line back into poverty and sliding poor households deeper into poverty. This paper applies this framework to examine the impact of shocks on the welfare of Sudanese households and explore coping strategies typically utilized by households to mitigate the negative effects of shocks. The paper uses the 2009 National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS) and the 2014-15 National Household Budget and Poverty Survey (NHBPS) to document the main types of shocks that Sudanese households are exposed to and describe the profile of Sudanese households likely to be vulnerable and/or resilient to shocks. To complement this analysis, the paper uses the most recent round of the data collected in 2014/15 (containing information on idiosyncratic shocks) together with data on covariate shocks such as rainfall and conflict obtained from other sources to estimate the impact of shocks on household welfare. Since the impact of shocks on household welfare is likely to be multidimensional, various indicators of household welfare such as consumption, poverty status, assets, dietary quality, and diversity are considered in the paper. Results from the analysis are used to highlight the state of social protection in Sudan and discuss the need for an expansion of the existing system.
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“Touray, Sering; Etang Ndip, Alvin. 2019. Shocks and Household Welfare in Sudan. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36099 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Shocks and Household Welfare in Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Sudanese economy has faced several shocks over the years—sometimes resulting in devastating impacts on the economy and the welfare of Sudanese households. Poor households are often particularly vulnerable to shocks. The extent of the impacts of shocks on household welfare depends on the nature and severity of the shocks as well as households’ capacity to manage its risk of exposure to shocks ex ante and/or mitigate the impact of shocks ex post. This paper applies this framework to examine the impact of shocks on the welfare of Sudanese households and explore coping strategies typically utilized by households to mitigate the negative effects of shocks. The paper uses the 2009 National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS) and the 2014/15 National Household Budget and Poverty Survey (NHBPS) to document the main types of shocks that Sudanese households are exposed to and describe the profile of Sudanese households likely to be vulnerable and/or resilient to shocks. To complement this analysis, the paper uses the most recent round of the data collected in 2014/15 (containing information on idiosyncratic shocks) together with data on covariate shocks such as rainfall and conflict obtained from other sources to estimate the impact of shocks on household welfare. Since the impact of shocks on household welfare is likely to be multidimensional, various indicators of household welfare such as consumption, poverty status, assets, dietary quality, and diversity are considered in the paper. Results from the analysis are used to highlight the state of social protection in Sudan and discuss the need for an expansion of the existing system. The prevalence of shocks in Sudan is most common among poor, agricultural, and rural households. Floods/droughts have the largest negative effect on the welfare of Sudanese households. The large negative effects of shocks on the welfare of Sudanese households (particularly those with low capacity to cope with shocks) highlight significant limitations in households’ ability to fully mitigate the impact of shocks.Publication Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Rural Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section two describes the state of the rural population in Sudan, by first discussing the spatial distribution of poverty across the states as well as changes in poverty levels between 2009 and 2014-15. It also describes the profile of poor rural households using characteristics such as their incomes, consumption, and assets. Section three focuses on the practice of agriculture in Sudan. It documents the agriculture-specific characteristics of households, such as choice of crops, use of inputs, irrigation, plot size, and credit access. We use these characteristics to illustrate the profile of rural farmers in Sudan and identify differences between poor and non-poor farmers. Section four describes agricultural yields across Sudan and relates these measures of farm productivity to the previously described farm characteristics to identify constraints to agricultural productivity. Section five concludes with a summary of the main findings and policy recommendations.Publication Reversing the Trend of Stunting in Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-02)The report is structured as follows: section two provides an overview of the existing literature on undernutrition and its determinants. Section three describes the methodology used in this report, the UNICEF conceptual framework and the MICS data collected in 2010 and 2014. The analysis section (section four) begins by describing the nature of stunting among 0-5-year-old children in Sudan highlighting differences in stunting rates across states, households, gender, and age groups. This analysis is followed by an overview of the extent of inequalities in access to adequate levels of nutrition drivers among 0–23-month-old children. The second part of section four examines the extent to which access to adequate levels of nutrition drivers influences stunting in Sudan. The authors estimate marginal effects of access levels (including individual and joint access) on the probability of being stunted to identify the main nutrition drivers that significantly affect stunting and the heterogeneity of their effects across space, wealth, and gender. Finally, section five concludes by discussing the implications of the results on multisectoral responses to stunting in Sudan.Publication Reversing the Trend of Stunting in Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)Stunting, measured using a height-for-age Z score [HAZ] and an indicator of chronic malnutrition, among 0–5-year-old Sudanese children has been on the rise—from 34 percent in 2010 to 38 percent in 2014. Although a multisectoral approach to tackling undernutrition may mask clarity and undermine specificity of sectors to prioritize, it can be a basis for designing evidenced-based and balanced multisectoral strategies to addressing stunting in Sudan. Overall, stunting is more prevalent in the early years of Sudanese children and among children from the poorest households and in rural areas where adequate access to the underlying drivers of nutrition also remains significantly low. Adequate access to nutrition drivers is strongly associated with a lower likelihood of being stunted. Among the nutrition drivers considered, adequate access to food security and care and health care (both individually and jointly) significantly lowers a child’s probability of being stunted. In rural areas and poor households where stunting rates are highest, prioritizing food security and access to adequate health care can contribute toward lowering stunting. Poverty remains a central feature of stunting in Sudan and a main source of inequalities in adequate access to nutrition driversPublication Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Rural Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)While agriculture remains the mainstay for a large share of the population in Sudan, and rural poverty has seen a dramatic decrease (between 2009 and 2014/15), poverty remains relatively high among those engaged in agriculture. Households engaged in agriculture—either crop farming or raising livestock—see among the highest rates of poverty among households classified by their main livelihoods in Sudan. As these households form a major bulk of the total population, understanding why these households remain poor and identifying strategies for lifting them out of poverty is a key concern for researchers and policy makers. This concern occupies the primary motivation for this study. Using data from the 2009 National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS) and 2014/15 National Household Budget and Poverty Survey (NHBPS), this study sheds light on the rural landscape in Sudan. Though rural Sudan has fared much better than urban Sudan between survey rounds, the number of poor remains higher in rural than in urban areas. Sudan severely lags other African countries in terms of agricultural productivity. Sorghum, Sudan’s most commonly produced crop—grown by close to half the agrarian households—has seen yields increase from below 500 kg per ha in 1995 to almost 700 kg per ha in 2017. A major constraint to improving crop productivity in Sudan is the low use of productivity-enhancing inputs, particularly fertilizers and pesticides and low-yield seed varieties. Increasing input use can be achieved by investing in rural markets. Market participation of agrarian households in Sudan is low, constraining farmers’ ability to raise their income levels and escape poverty. Improving rural transportation and telecommunications networks, providing access to rural credit and financial services, and increasing the ease of doing business for input providers and output marketers can increase the geographic penetration of agrarian input and output markets. Though sorghum and millet remain the dominant crops grown in Sudan, the recent increase in the number of households growing sesame is a welcome development. Deteriorations in the irrigation infrastructure need to be reversed to ensure Sudan remains competitive in the export of commercial crops. Access to cell phones has significantly increased channels of communication for the rural poor.
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