Publication: Who did Covid-19 hurt the most in Sub-Saharan Africa ?
Loading...
Date
2024-03-21
ISSN
Published
2024-03-21
Editor(s)
Abstract
How did the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic impact poor households in Sub-Saharan Africa This paper tackles this question by combining 73 High-Frequency Phone Surveys collected by national governments in 14 countries with older nationally representative surveys containing information on household consumption. In particular, it examines how outcomes differed according to predicted per capita consumption quintiles in the first wave of the survey, and in subsequent waves by households’ predicted per capita consumption. The initial shock affected households throughout the predicted welfare distribution. Households in the bottom 40 percent responded by sharply increasing farming activities between May and July of 2020 and gradually increasing ownership of non-farm enterprises starting in August. This coincided with an improvement in welfare, as measured by a decline in food insecurity and distressed asset sales among these households during the second half of 2020. With respect to education, children in the bottom quintile were 15 percentage points less likely to engage in learning activities than those in the top quintile in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and the engagement gap between the bottom 40 and top 60 widened in the summer before narrowing in the fall due to large declines in engagement among the top 60. Poorer households were slightly more likely to report receiving public assistance immediately following the shock, and this difference changed little over the course of 2020. The results highlight the widespread impacts of the crisis both on welfare and children’s educational engagement, the importance of agriculture and household non-farm enterprises as safety nets for the poor, and the substantial recovery made by the poorest households in the year following the crisis.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Seuyong, Feraud Tchuisseu; Edochie, Ifeanyi; Newhouse, David; Silwal, Ani Rudra. 2024. Who did Covid-19 hurt the most in Sub-Saharan Africa ?. Policy Research Working Paper; 10726. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41252 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication Rethinking Fiscal Policies(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-27)This paper examines the redistributive impact of fiscal policy—specifically taxes and transfers—on poverty and inequality in eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa: the Arab Republic of Egypt, Djibouti, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the West Bank and Gaza. Utilizing the Commitment to Equity framework, the analysis evaluates how fiscal interventions alter income distribution across these diverse national contexts. The results indicate that direct cash transfers and social assistance programs are generally effective in reducing poverty and shielding vulnerable populations, while in-kind benefits—particularly in education and healthcare—significantly contribute to mitigating income inequality. In contrast, generalized subsidies, especially in the energy sector, are fiscally burdensome and largely regressive, offering limited equity gains. Indirect taxes, although important for revenue generation, often exacerbate income disparities. The study underscores the need for comprehensive fiscal reforms, including the expansion of well-targeted transfers, adoption of progressive taxation, and reallocation of inefficient subsidies toward investments in human capital. Successful initiatives, such as Egypt’s Takaful and Karama and Jordan’s Takaful and bread subsidy compensation programs, illustrate scalable models of effective redistribution. Moreover, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s progressive tax policies highlight viable pathways to equitable revenue mobilization. Strengthening investment in education and health is essential for promoting long-term equity, enhancing upward mobility, and supporting inclusive and sustainable development across the region.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication How Did Urban Household Enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa Fare during COVID-19 ?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03)While the impact of COVID-19 on Sub-Saharan African labor markets is well documented, there is suggestive evidence that urban households may have fared particularly poorly. This paper uses data from high-frequency phone surveys in 27 Sub-Saharan African countries to investigate which kinds of urban household enterprises were most affected, what coping strategies were utilized, and heterogeneity by sociodemographic characteristics in the short and medium run. Using linear probability models, the paper finds that households that relied on income from non-farm enterprises were hit particularly hard during the early stage of the crisis, with 20-26 percent reporting income declines, and women experiencing even greater losses. Few coping strategies were utilized in the short run to counterbalance the loss of enterprise income. As the crisis progressed, wage employment recovered more quickly than self-employment, with faster gains for non-farm household enterprises, less poor households, and those headed by males and adults. Women, adults, and non-poor self-employed household heads were more successful at leveraging external sources of support early in the pandemic, but these supports largely dropped off by August 2020. These results demonstrate the vulnerability of non-farm household enterprises in urban Sub-Saharan Africa to the COVID-19 shock and highlight the need to expand publicly and privately financed coping mechanisms, particularly for women, youth, and poor household heads who are self-employed.Publication Urban Informality in Sub-Saharan Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-14)This paper describes the state of informal sector work in urban Sub-Saharan Africa, using household surveys from 26 countries representing 61 percent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa and firm surveys from three countries. Five main conclusions emerge. First, the urban informal sector is large and persistent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Approximately 56 to 65 percent of urban workers are informal, half of whom are self-employed. Data from five countries suggest little systematic reduction in the prevalence of informality during the 2010s. Second, heterogeneity in the African informal sector cuts along demographic lines. Women are overrepresented in informal self-employment, men in informal wage work, and youth in unpaid employment. Third, while the urban informal workers are, on average, poorer and in less-skilled occupations than formal sector workers, the majority are not extremely poor and are in mid-skilled occupations. Fourth, informal enterprises are small and are challenged to survive and grow into job-creating firms. Few find much benefit from registration given the costs, both monetary (taxes) and transactional (information about the registration process). Fifth, access to urban public services (utilities) is weakly associated with the probability of working in an informal job, although access to mobile phones is high across all job types. If thriving urban jobs are to contribute to economic and social development in Africa, it will be crucial for policies and programs to take into consideration the heterogeneity in jobs, the profile of workers, and the urban context.Publication How Much Will Poverty Rise in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2020?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05)The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is expected to drastically slow 2020 GDP per capita growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by about 5 percentage points compared to pre-pandemic forecasts. This note presents results from an analysis of a comprehensive database of surveys from 45 of 48 SSA countries to examine the effects of the project fall in growth on poverty in the region. An additional 26 million people in SSA, and as much as 58 million, may fall into extreme poverty defined by the international poverty line of 1.90 US Dollars per day in 2011 PPP. The poverty rate for SSA will likely increase more than two percentage points, setting back poverty reduction in the region by about 5 years.Publication Measuring Internet Access in Sub-Saharan Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)The ability to access the internet has increasingly become an important tool for poverty reduction, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its importance, measuring internet use in low-income settings is plagued by differences between data sources and lack of a consistent definition of what it means exactly to have internet access. This Note compares different data sources available for monitoring internet use in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and examines a database of household surveys from 25 countries in the region. Three main findings emerge: (a) Household internet access may be less prevalent than commonly believed, (b) Access rates are particularly low for rural and poorer households, and (c) Many people in SSA access the internet through mobile phones rather than a home computer. Although many questions remain unanswered, household surveys are an important and underutilized resource to inform efforts to expand internet access in SSA.Publication Educational inequalities during COVID-19: Results from longitudinal surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa(Elsevier, 2025-01-21)While the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic is growing, there are few studies on learning inequalities in a lower-income, multi-country context. Analyzing a rich database consisting of 34 longitudinal household and phone survey rounds from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda with a rigorous linear mixed model framework, we find lower school enrolment rates during the pandemic. But countries exhibit heterogeneity. Our variance decomposition analysis suggests that policies targeting individual household members are most effective for improving learning activities, followed by those targeting households, communities, and regions. Households with higher education levels or living standards or those in urban residences are more likely to engage their children in learning activities and more diverse types of learning activities. Furthermore, we find some evidence for a strong and positive relationship between public transfers and household head employment with learning activities for almost all the countries.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Economic Recovery(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-06)World Bank Group President David Malpass spoke about the world facing major challenges, including COVID, climate change, rising poverty and inequality and growing fragility and violence in many countries. He highlighted vaccines, working closely with Gavi, WHO, and UNICEF, the World Bank has conducted over one hundred capacity assessments, many even more before vaccines were available. The World Bank Group worked to achieve a debt service suspension initiative and increased transparency in debt contracts at developing countries. The World Bank Group is finalizing a new climate change action plan, which includes a big step up in financing, building on their record climate financing over the past two years. He noted big challenges to bring all together to achieve GRID: green, resilient, and inclusive development. Janet Yellen, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, mentioned focusing on vulnerable people during the pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, focused on giving everyone a fair shot during a sustainable recovery. All three commented on the importance of tackling climate change.Publication South Asia Development Update, April 2024: Jobs for Resilience(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-02)South Asia is expected to continue to be the fastest-growing emerging market and developing economy (EMDE) region over the next two years. This is largely thanks to robust growth in India, but growth is also expected to pick up in most other South Asian economies. However, growth in the near-term is more reliant on the public sector than elsewhere, whereas private investment, in particular, continues to be weak. Efforts to rein in elevated debt, borrowing costs, and fiscal deficits may eventually weigh on growth and limit governments' ability to respond to increasingly frequent climate shocks. Yet, the provision of public goods is among the most effective strategies for climate adaptation. This is especially the case for households and farms, which tend to rely on shifting their efforts to non-agricultural jobs. These strategies are less effective forms of climate adaptation, in part because opportunities to move out of agriculture are limited by the region’s below-average employment ratios in the non-agricultural sector and for women. Because employment growth is falling short of working-age population growth, the region fails to fully capitalize on its demographic dividend. Vibrant, competitive firms are key to unlocking the demographic dividend, robust private investment, and workers’ ability to move out of agriculture. A range of policies could spur firm growth, including improved business climates and institutions, the removal of financial sector restrictions, and greater openness to trade and capital flows.Publication Remarks at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-12)World Bank Group President David Malpass discussed biodiversity and climate change being closely interlinked, with terrestrial and marine ecosystems serving as critically important carbon sinks. At the same time climate change acts as a direct driver of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss. The World Bank has financed biodiversity conservation around the world, including over 116 million hectares of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas, 10 million hectares of Terrestrial Protected Areas, and over 300 protected habitats, biological buffer zones and reserves. The COVID pandemic, biodiversity loss, climate change are all reminders of how connected we are. The recovery from this pandemic is an opportunity to put in place more effective policies, institutions, and resources to address biodiversity loss.Publication Education, Social Norms, and the Marriage Penalty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-16)A growing literature attributes gender inequality in labor market outcomes in part to the reduction in female labor supply after childbirth, the child penalty. However, if social norms constrain married women’s activities outside the home, then marriage can independently reduce employment, even in the absence childbearing. Given the correlation in timing between childbirth and marriage, conventional estimates of child penalties will conflate these two effects. The paper studies the marriage penalty in South Asia, a context featuring conservative gender norms and low female labor force participation. The study introduces a split-sample, pseudo-panel approach that allows for the separation of marriage and child penalties even in the absence of individual-level panel data. Marriage reduces women’s labor force participation in South Asia by 12 percentage points, whereas the marginal penalty of childbearing is small. Consistent with the central roles of both opportunity costs and social norms, the marriage penalty is smaller among cohorts with higher education and less conservative gender attitudes.Publication Media and Messages for Nutrition and Health(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has experienced rapid and significant economic growth over the past decade. However, poor nutritional outcomes remain a concern. Rates of childhood undernutrition are particularly high in remote, rural, and upland areas. Media have the potential to play an important role in shaping health and nutrition–related behaviors and practices as well as in promoting sociocultural and economic development that might contribute to improved nutritional outcomes. This report presents the results of a media audit (MA) that was conducted to inform the development and production of mass media advocacy and communication strategies and materials with a focus on maternal and child health and nutrition that would reach the most people from the poorest communities in northern Lao PDR. Making more people aware of useful information, essential services and products and influencing them to use these effectively is the ultimate goal of mass media campaigns, and the MA measures the potential effectiveness of media efforts to reach this goal. The effectiveness of communication channels to deliver health and nutrition messages to target beneficiaries to ensure maximum reach and uptake can be viewed in terms of preferences, satisfaction, and trust. Overall, the four most accessed media channels for receiving information among communities in the study areas were village announcements, mobile phones, television, and out-of-home (OOH) media. Of the accessed media channels, the top three most preferred channels were village announcements (40 percent), television (26 percent), and mobile phones (19 percent). In terms of trust, village announcements were the most trusted source of information (64 percent), followed by mobile phones (14 percent) and television (11 percent). Hence of all the media channels, village announcements are the most preferred, have the most satisfied users, and are the most trusted source of information in study communities from four provinces in Lao PDR with some of the highest burden of childhood undernutrition.