COVID-19

COVID-19

Starting in March 2020, the world has had to cope with the health and economic impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In response, we have shift our focus and resource to work across the globe to help researchers and policymakers understand how the pandemic has impacted people's livelihoods. We use phone and internet surveys to collect data at a distance. Our ongoing projects include the following:

COVID-19 has impacted agricultural supply chains across the globe and initial reports suggest that the effects of the pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa may be particularly pronounced. This work uses the recently generated data from the LSMS COVID-19 phone surveys to investigate conditions in Africa, focusing on the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and livelihood diversification and agricultural sector participation before the pandemic, as well as household decision-making, bargaining, and equity and the relationship with household coping, mitigating, and surviving COVID-19. Learn more by visiting our Github RepoCollaborators: A. Furbush (UArizona), L. Rudin-Rush (UArizona), and T. Kilic (World Bank).

(NFACT) is a collaboration of researchers across 14 states exploring the impact of COVID-19 on food access, food security and food systems.  NFACT research is examining these impacts across local, state, regional and national levels and is integrating data to explore outcomes and impacts across scales. NFACT is committed to rigorous, comparative, and timely food access research during the time of COVID.  We do this through collaborative, open access platforms and research that prioritizes communication to key decision-makers while building our scientific understanding of food system behaviors and policies. NFACT was founded by researchers from The University of Vermont, Johns Hopkins University, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona. Learn more about our ongoing work at our website.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and attempts to limit its spread have resulted in a contraction of the global economy. Here we document the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic among households, adults and children in low-income countries. To do so, we rely on longitudinal household survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda, originating from pre-COVID-19 face-to-face household surveys plus phone surveys implemented during the pandemic. We estimate that 256 million individuals—77% of the population—live in households that have lost income during the pandemic. Attempts to cope with this loss are exacerbated by food insecurity and an inability to access medicine and staple foods. Finally, we find that student–teacher contact has dropped from a pre-COVID-19 rate of 96% to just 17% among households with school-aged children. These findings can inform decisions by governments and international organizations on measures to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more by reading our article in Nature Human Behaviour and in the book Shaping Africa's Post-Covid Recovery. Collaborators: T. Kilic (World Bank).