This study provides an assessment of changes in household income, livelihood sources, food consumption, and diet quality during the first months of the COVID-19 crisis in a sample of households drawn from both urban and rural areas in Ghana. Phone surveys were conducted in June 2020 with 423 urban consumers in Accra and with 369 small-scale crop and fish farmers in rural areas in six regions in middle and southern Ghana. Data was disaggregated by asset quintiles for both the urban and the rural samples. Reduction in incomes were reported by 83 percent of urban households in Accra, mainly due to business closures and lower sales from their trading enterprises. Most households, however, are showing resilience in terms of food consumption, with a majority of urban consumers surveyed maintaining their pre-COVID-19 level of food consumption; only 9 percent of urban consumers reported reductions in food consumption to cope with income loss due to COVID-19. For the respondents in the rural areas in middle and southern Ghana, 76 percent reported income loss, and all reported that their livelihoods had been affected. Thirty-four percent of 2020 minor season crop farmers experienced difficulty in selling their produce, and 43 percent of all sample crop farmers anticipated difficulties in accessing inputs in the 2020 major season, mainly fertilizers and agrochemicals. Of those growing fish, 53 percent experienced difficulty in accessing inputs, mainly feeds; 60 percent reported increased input prices; and 64 percent of those harvesting from March to June 2020 experienced difficulties in selling their fish because of lower demand, lower tilapia prices, and higher transportation costs. Despite farm and nonfarm income losses, a majority of households in the rural sample reported maintaining previous levels of diet diversity and food consumption - only 11 percent reported reducing their food consumption to cope with income loss. Several months into the COVID-19 crisis in Ghana, households in both rural and urban areas showed some resilience in terms of their agricultural production and food consumption. Regular monitoring is needed, however, especially if household savings start to dry up and coping mechanisms become more restrictive.

Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar’s Dry Zone. Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 – median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences. These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.

Global estimates show over half a billion people go hungry (FAO, 2020) and close to 2 billion people are either obese or overweight with another 2 billion of the world’s population suffering from micronutrient deficiencies (Micha et al., 2020, Fresco et al., 2017). Inarguably, the world faces significant malnutrition problem (including micro- and macro-nutrient deficiencies, obesity, and diet related non-communicable diseases). This is evident in a recent analysis pointing out that effort in achieving the Global Nutrition Targets is likely to be missed. The observed malnutrition threat is accompanied by climate change, which is influencing food production and consumption trends, and thereby leading to undernutrition and affecting overall development. In addition, there are growing incomes, accelerated urbanization, and expanding middle classes which are also causing significant changes in consumer behaviour and nutritional choices, necessitating both public and private expenditures for better food market integration. As a result, there is a pressing need to examine our food systems to guarantee food and nutrition security and to advance sustainable development. It is likely that the COVID-19 impact may further exacerbates the worsening food insecurity and nutritional status of the most vulnerable groups including women, children and adolescents, refugees and displaced people, smallholders in rural areas, and the urban poor.

Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar's Dry Zone.Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 - median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences.These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.

This paper combines pre-pandemic face-to-face survey data with follow up phone surveys collected in April-May 2020 to quantify the overall and differential impacts of COVID-19 on household food security, labor market participation and local food prices in Nigeria. We exploit spatial variation in exposure to COVID-19 related infections and lockdown measures along with temporal differences in our outcomes of interest using a difference-in-difference approach. We find that those households exposed to higher COVID-19 cases or mobility lockdowns experience a significant increase in measures of food insecurity. Examining possible transmission channels for this effect, we find that COVID-19 significantly reduces labor market participation and increases food prices. We find that impacts differ by economic activities and households. For instance, lockdown measures increased households' experience of food insecurity by 12 percentage points and reduced the probability of participation in non-farm business activities by 13 percentage points. These lockdown measures have smaller impacts on wage-related activities and farming activities. In terms of food security, households relying on non-farm businesses, poorer households, those with school-aged children, and those living in remote and conflicted-affected zones have experienced relatively larger deteriorations in food insecurity. These findings can help inform immediate and medium-term policy responses, including social protection policies aiming at ameliorating the impacts of the pandemic, as well as guide targeting strategies of governments and international donor agencies by identifying the most impacted sub-populations.

While the lockdown in Ghana due to COVID-19 was not as stringent or long as in other countries (at least up to June 2021), it has severely affected rural household incomes, including remittances. Almost three-quarters of households surveyed reported income loss due to the pandemic in Aug/Sep 2020. Use of savings, borrowing and asset sales were common. Women often relied on men’s savings as a coping strategy; government transfers were insignificant. Addressing COVID-19 in rural areas is hindered by a domestic water supply crisis. Approximately half of respondents reported being worried about water availability, changing their activities due to lack of water, not having enough drinking water, and not washing hands when necessary.

In the wake of the global food crisis of 2007–08 and additional price spikes since then, greater attention has been given to the welfare impact of food price increases in developing countries. The standard approach in this type of analysis, proposed by Deaton (1989), is based on income and expenditure data from household surveys. Given the widespread use of this method, it is important to revisit the assumptions behind it and examine the sensitivity of results to those assumptions. In this paper, we explore the distributional impact of higher maize, rice, and food prices in Ghana and analyze the robustness of those results to changes in several key assumptions. The results suggest that higher maize and rice prices have a relatively modest short-term impact on national poverty but significant effects on specific groups of households. As expected, urban households lose from higher grain prices, but a surprisingly large share of rural households also lose because they are net buyers. The results also suggest that the current policy of protecting domestic rice producers with an import tax does not contribute to national poverty reduction, in spite of the fact that rice growers tend to be poor. If we relax the assumption that households do not respond to the higher prices, the effects are more positive or less negative, but only modestly so. On the other hand, if we relax the assumption that producer and consumer prices rise by the same proportion, and instead assume a constant marketing margin, the results change substantially. Because producer prices now rise by a larger proportion than consumer prices, the impact of higher prices is much more positive. These findings highlight the need for more research on the effect of price spikes on marketing margins.