Understanding households’ resilience to and recovery from COVID-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa

COVID-19 has brought to the fore the hardships faced by households and individuals as they attempt to cope with the ongoing shocks and reverberating impacts of the pandemic. Absent the coronavirus pandemic, innumerable shocks, including those from weather, conflict, civil unrest, and macroeconomic instability, threaten the livelihoods of millions of families around the world. Smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are particularly vulnerable to these various shocks and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to cope with these risks, households employ a number of ex-ante and ex-post coping mechanisms. For farming households across SSA, among whom insurance against realized risks is not common, these strategies often involve reallocation of resources, monies, and labor, within the family structure and larger household. We investigate livelihood diversification as a coping strategy for dealing with the multiple stressors, specifically the compounding risks of COVID-19, with climate, conflict and civil unrest, and other shocks. We examine the non-insurance-based mitigation strategies for coping with risks and shocks via labor allocation and reallocation. Currently, there is limited empirical evidence on the efficacy of coping strategies to mitigate negative impacts on a wider range of livelihood outcomes under extreme economic downturns, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also explore heterogeneous reallocation strategies and outcomes for various population subgroups (e.g., urban versus rural households, female- versus male- headed households, different levels of education across households). Research questions: 1. How has household income composition/diversification changed since the pandemic? 2. How does household income composition/diversification impact household-level livelihood outcomes? 3. How do compounding shocks such as climate change, civil unrest, and conflict influence household livelihood outcomes above and beyond the impacts of the pandemic? 4. How do changes in income composition/diversification and subsequent effects on household-level livelihood outcomes vary across different population subgroups?