Fig 2 - uploaded by Wendy Janssens
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Trends in selected inflow variables, income from work (left) and gifts/remittances (right). Notes: The dots represent the weekly average, with a 95% confidence interval.
Context in source publication
Context 1
... households have lower amounts of loans outstanding, yet a higher share has a loan at a formal institution, compared to the county averages. Fig. 1 shows a decreasing trend in total cash inflows and outflows since mid-March. Especially income from work (e.g. revenue from informal business, wage work), and received gifts and remittances went down (Fig. 2). Table 2 shows that weekly income significantly declined with up to Ksh 666 towards the end of April, compared to a pre-COVID-19 average of Ksh ...
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Citations
... Literature shows that health shocks trigger borrowing or assistance from friends and family rather than the use of any other strategy as these shocks are idiosyncratic (11)(12)(13)(14). However, evidence of a reduction in these informal-risk sharing coping mechanisms during Covid-19 pandemic has also been reported elsewhere (15). Additionally, others (16) also found evidence that there was less reliance on savings during a lockdown as a result of Covid-19 pandemic. ...
Background
Covid-19 pandemic induced various shocks to households in Malawi, many of which were failing to cope. Household coping mechanisms to shocks have an implication on household poverty status and that of a nation as a whole. In order to assist households to respond to the pandemic-induced shocks positively, the government of Malawi, with support from non-governmental organizations introduced Covid-19 Urban Cash Intervention (CUCI) and other safety nets to complement the existing social protection programs in cushioning the impact of the shocks during the pandemic. With these programmes in place, there is a need for evidence regarding how the safety nets are affecting coping. Therefore, this paper investigated the impact that safety nets during Covid-19 pandemic had on the following household coping mechanisms: engaging in additional income-generating activities, receiving assistance from friends and family; reducing food consumption; relying on savings; and failure to cope.
Methods
The study used a nationally representative panel data from the Malawi High Frequency Phone Survey on Covid-19 (HFPS Covid-19) and complemented it with the fifth Integrated Household Panel Survey (IHPS), also known as living standards measurement survey. Five Random Effects Probit Models were estimated, one for each coping mechanism.
Results
Findings from this study indicated that beneficiaries of safety net programs were more likely to rely on remittances from friends and family than the people who had no safety nets. Furthermore, the safety net recipients were less likely to reduce food consumption or rely on savings than the non-recipients. Despite the interesting findings, we also noticed that safety nets had no significant impact on household engagement in other income-generating activities in response to shocks.
Conclusion
The results imply that safety nets in Malawi during the Covid-19 pandemic had a positive impact on consumption and prevented the dissolving of savings. Therefore, these programs have to be scaled up, and the volumes be revised upwards.
... 17 Similarly, over two-thirds of cell phone users across rural and urban Kenya and Uganda reported decreases in income-generating activities. 18 Other surveys in vulnerable populations, such as low-income mothers in Kenya 19 and mothers in rural Bangladesh, 20 have documented double-digit percentage declines in income. Also, low-income and vulnerable populations in high-income countries have experienced inequitable cuts to economic opportunity. ...
Importance
COVID-19 lockdowns may affect economic and health outcomes, but evidence from low- and middle-income countries remains limited.
Objective
To assess the economic security, food security, health, and sexual behavior of women at high risk of HIV infection in rural Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This survey study of women enrolled in a randomized trial in a rural county in Kenya combined results from phone interviews, conducted while social distancing measures were in effect between May 13 and June 29, 2020, with longitudinal, in-person surveys administered between September 1, 2019, and March 25, 2020. Enrolled participants were HIV-negative and had 2 or more sexual partners within the past month. Surveys collected information on economic conditions, food security, health status, and sexual behavior. Subgroup analyses compared outcomes by reliance on transactional sex for income and by educational attainment. Data were analyzed between May 2020 and April 2021.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Self-reported income, employment hours, numbers of sexual partners and transactional sex partners, food security, and COVID-19 prevention behaviors.
Results
A total of 1725 women participated, with a mean (SD) age of 29.3 (6.8) years and 1170 (68.0%) reporting sex work as an income source before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, participants reported experiencing a 52% decline in mean (SD) weekly income, from 5.38 (12.51) (difference, −6.91 to −$4.82; P < .001). In all, 1385 participants (80.3%) reported difficulty obtaining food in the past month, and 1500 (87.0%) worried about having enough to eat at least once. Reported numbers of sexual partners declined from a mean (SD) total of 1.8 (1.2) partners before COVID-19 to 1.1 (1.0) during (difference, −0.75 partners; 95% CI, −0.84 to −0.67 partners; P < .001), and transactional sex partners declined from 1.0 (1.1) to 0.5 (0.8) (difference, −0.57 partners; 95% CI, −0.64 to −0.50 partners; P < .001). In subgroup analyses, women reliant on transactional sex for income were 18.3% (95% CI, 11.4% to 25.2%) more likely to report being sometimes or often worried that their household would have enough food than women not reliant on transactional sex (P < .001), and their reported decline in employment was 4.6 hours (95% CI, −7.9 to −1.2 hours) greater than women not reliant on transactional sex (P = .008).
Conclusions and Relevance
In this survey study, COVID-19 was associated with large reductions in economic security among women at high risk of HIV infection in Kenya. However, shifts in sexual behavior may have temporarily decreased their risk of HIV infection.
... These often rely on retrospectively asking about situation before the crisis but early results from Colombia, Ghana and Rwanda are broadly similar to ours -loss in income, depletion in food consumption, the need to use savings and borrow. 4 Similar findings have also emerged from a series of studies in neighbouring Kenya (Janssens et al., 2020). 5 Our study has the unique advantage of a baseline survey immediately before the lockdown, to which we can compare outcomes since lockdown. ...
We provide evidence on the economic and well-being impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on a sample of households in rural Uganda. Our sample consists of 1,277 households randomly drawn from 114 rural villages in western Uganda and surveyed in-person in early March 2020, just before the lockdown. We followed up with this sample in May 2020, reaching over 85% of them by phone. We find a large decline of 60% in household non-farm income due to household enterprise profits and labour income being almost wiped-out post the lockdown. Households respond to this loss of income in three key ways. One, there is a 40% decrease in food expenditure per adult equivalent. Two, they use up nearly 50% of their savings and borrow more, but have not yet liquidated their fixed assets or sold livestock. Three, they increase total household labour supply to household farm and livestock, more than making up for the decline in supply to enterprises and labour outside the household. We find a decrease in well-being as a result of this: there is an increase in the likelihood of missing a meal, a decline in reported satisfaction with quality of life, a higher likelihood of having a major argument with their spouse and an increase in perceived frequency of intimate partner violence against women in the village. The negative effects of the lockdown are greater for households that were wealthier at baseline, since these households were more reliant on enterprise and salaried income. These results were one of the first to show a large negative impact of the lockdown for a rural population. Our findings are important to policy makers in Uganda and other developing countries as they suggest income and consumption support is needed for rural households.
Even before the pandemic, there were inequalities showing that health and ill-health were not equally distributed in the country. History has shown that public health emergencies such as Covid-19 can disproportionately impact communities that are already disadvantaged. Drawing from these existing structural issues documented in the literature and media reports, qualitative interviews were conducted to examine the impacts of Covid-19 mitigation measures on sectors and vulnerable segments of the Kenyan society. We highlighted that insufficient attention paid to existing inequalities and the needs of vulnerable and marginalized groups subjected them to a higher risk of infection and undermined the broader Covid-19 response. We also shed light on the impacts of the pandemic on the health sector and access to health care. We argue that the mitigation measures were inadequate to protect vulnerable groups from harm; therefore, the responses exacerbated their socioeconomic status and health.
