The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on human life and brought major disruption to economic activity across the world. Despite a late arrival, the COVID-19 virus has spread rapidly across Sub-Saharan Africa in recent weeks. Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to decline from 2.4 percent in 2019 to -2.1 to -5.1 percent in 2020, the first recession in the region in 25 years. The coronavirus is hitting the region’s three largest economies —Nigeria, South Africa, and Angola— in a context of persistently weak growth and investment. In particular, countries that depend on oil and mining exports would be hit the hardest. The negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household welfare would be equally dramatic. African policymakers need to develop a two-pronged strategy of “saving lives and protecting livelihoods.†? This strategy includes relief measures and recovery measures aimed at strengthening health systems, providing income support to workers and liquidity support to viable businesses. However, financing of these policies will be challenging amid deteriorating fiscal positions and heightened public debt vulnerabilities. Therefore, African countries will require financial assistance from their development partners -including COVID-19 related multilateral assistance and a debt service stand still with creditors.

It is widely recognized that periods of crisis affect men and women differently, mediated by their access to resources and information, as well as social and institutional structures that may systematically disadvantage women from being able to access relief, institutional support, and rehabilitation. To capture the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, we conducted phone surveys in seven countries spread across Asia and Africa. The study was designed as a longitudinal panel study with five rounds of data collection in Ghana, Nepal, Nigeria, and Senegal, and three rounds of data collection in Kenya, Niger, and Uganda. Both men and women were administered the same survey, with some modifications made across countries to adapt to local contexts. This report gives an overview of our findings covering several topics including income loss, coping strategies, labor and time use, food and water insecurity and child education outcomes. We find widespread reports of income loss, which declined over time, but increased again as countries experienced a resurgence in COVID-19 cases and fatality. We find that households first depleted savings when faced with income loss and over time, use of savings reduced while other measures began to be adopted. Women reported greater food and water insecurity compared to men, including worrying about insufficient food and eating less than usual. This is particularly worrying since a large proportion of women also did not have adequately diverse diets. Moderate to severe water insecurity was reported in many of the countries, and as with food insecurity, women were more likely to report issues with accessing water for drinking and other household activities. In some countries, additional modules were added to capture country specific issues of policy relevance, such agriculture extension, mental health, and child marriage. The results make it clear that proactive investments will be needed, including social safety nets, favorable credit policies, nutrition and water investments, to ensure that the crisis does not further widen the gender gap in resources and achievements in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the critical need for detailed, timely information on its evolving economic impacts, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where data availability and lack of generalizable nowcasting methodologies limit efforts for coordinated policy responses. This paper presents a suite of high frequency and granular country-level indicator tools that can be used to nowcast GDP and track changes in economic activity for countries in SSA. We make two main contributions: (1) demonstration of the predictive power of alternative data variables such as Google search trends and mobile payments, and (2) implementation of two types of modelling methodologies, machine learning and parametric factor models, that have flexibility to incorporate mixed-frequency data variables. We present nowcast results for 2019Q4 and 2020Q1 GDP for Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Ghana, and argue that our factor model methodology can be generalized to nowcast and forecast GDP for other SSA countries with limited data availability and shorter timeframes.

This critical research collection focuses on Eastern and Southern Africa providing timely and valuable insights and reflections around the changes and stabilities within media ecosystems caused by the novel Covid-19 crises.

The labor structure in sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by a high share of informal employment in the rural agricultural sector. The impact of COVID-19 on female employment may not appear to be large as the share of such employment is particularly high among women. Nevertheless, widespread income reduction was observed both in rural and urban households. This could worsen the opportunities for women as husbands’ control over the household resource is the norm. The paper also finds that rural children struggled to continue learning during school closures. Gender-sensitive policies are needed to narrow the gap during and post-pandemic.