Measuring Household Welfare and Economic Activity in Kenya during COVID-19
Quick pivots to research processes have allowed for real time data collection that can answer questions about the resilience and recovery of rural communities.
This blog, written by CEGA Senior Research Associates Michelle Layvant and Layna Lowe, is part of a series of posts on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting research processes.
COVID-19 is creating negative health and economic impacts around the globe, and most countries are adopting different social distancing, lockdown, and/or curfew policies to reduce transmission. In order to shed light on the effects of such policies, we must be able to answer questions on the welfare of local communities — are employees able to continue working? Are people consuming less food and other goods? Are individuals experiencing additional stress and anxiety? Understanding how households and businesses are faring and adapting during this time is critically important, particularly in the Global South, where many households rely on income from self-employment or work for wages in the informal sector and may not have access to government assistance programs.
Research projects that focus on household outcomes typically collect data through in-person surveys, where field officers visit the households of study participants. In order to limit transmission, many of these projects have been put on pause; however, some have been able to quickly adapt to alternative methods of data collection. Three long-term studies in Western Kenya (described in further detail below) have done exactly that. Because of existing on-the-ground infrastructure, these projects swiftly pivoted to conducting surveys via mobile phone and will provide important data on the experience of Kenyan households during this crisis.
The swift transition to phone surveys required a confluence of several moving pieces. First, the research teams had to develop survey questionnaires that measure changes in household welfare during the COVID-19 pandemic, are synergistic with the original research projects, and are appropriate to be administered over the phone. Second, based on the guidance of experienced survey management staff in Kenya, and enthusiasm and adaptability of enumerators, research teams developed new work plans for conducting phone surveys while working from home. Cell phones and headsets were procured to conduct surveys, multiple conference calls were held to train field officers on the new surveys and updated protocols, and team leads were responsible for tracking daily progress, debriefing, and reporting feedback to researchers. Finally, new funding for this specific survey round needed to be rapidly secured. Numerous donor organizations made new COVID-related funding available, allowing research teams to cover field operations for the additional months needed to conduct phone surveys. All of these efforts in concert have enabled research teams to collect these crucial data.
The impact of these phone surveys are two-fold: First, data collected from these projects can assist public health monitoring of the pandemic by tracking knowledge of and behavioral adaptation to COVID-19 in these rural communities. Second, this research can shed light on how lockdown policies are affecting the livelihoods of households by collecting data on measures such as earnings, consumption, food security, and mental health. Furthermore, the phone survey data can be combined with the existing research from these projects to answer questions about resilience and recovery of rural communities. All of this information can inform government and NGO response to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic shocks.
Real time data from these three projects will be uploaded at kenyacovidtracker.org in order to monitor these effects over time.
Stay tuned for forthcoming blog posts in July 2020 reviewing preliminary results of these COVID-related phone surveys.
General Equilibrium Effects of Cash Transfers
The General Equilibrium Effects of Cash Transfers (GE) project is a randomized control trial conducted by CEGA faculty co-director Ted Miguel, CEGA Affiliate Paul Niehaus, and coauthors, where a one-time unconditional cash transfer of about $1,000 was provided to over 10,500 households. The study aims to understand how large-scale cash infusions affect individual recipients and local economies as a whole. It found that the cash transfers not only benefited recipient households but also their neighbors, because recipients spent more money in local businesses. Despite the cash transfers totaling to 15 percent of local GDP, price inflation of consumer goods was minimal.
GE’s COVID-19 phone surveys are administered to households and businesses. Data from both demand- and supply-side allows the research team to understand how disruptions to market centers are affecting the economy at different levels. Researchers can also investigate how receipt of the initial cash transfer may help households in a time of crisis.
Once travel restrictions ease and risk of transmission minimizes, the GE project will be conducting another round of surveys on households, businesses, and markets to assess long-term impacts 5 years since the cash transfers were distributed.
Kenya Life Panel Survey
The Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), designed by Ted Miguel and coauthors, is a long-term panel survey providing detailed measures of various health, educational, social, and employment outcomes among a sample of thousands of Kenyans who were participants in one or more randomized evaluations of social, health, and/or economic development programs (most notably a deworming study in Western Kenya). The same group of individuals have been surveyed multiple times over 20 years spanning from grade school through early adulthood. The current round of data collection collects data on over 8,000 Kenyan adults and their biological children to measure the long-term and intergenerational impacts of various social and economic programs.
Panel surveys, such as these, are not only useful in tracking the long-term effects of interventions, but can be used to answer a diverse set of questions by researchers worldwide. Moreover, while panel surveys are becoming increasingly popular, a dearth of such data still exists in Sub-Saharan African countries. The panel aspect of the KLPS survey allows researchers to learn about COVID-19 from a particularly unique angle: Researchers can not only assess the impact of COVID-19 using the new phone survey data, but they can also compare with data collected before and after the pandemic, asking questions such as “Are there certain populations that ‘bounce-back’ more quickly, and why?”
Rural Electric Power Project / Last Mile Connectivity Project
The Rural Electricity Power Project (REPP) and Last Mile Connectivity Project (LMCP) are a pair of related projects studying the process of electrification in rural Kenya and its impacts on households and firms. In the REPP study, a sample of over 2,000 households across 150 rural communities were provided randomly varied subsidies to connect to the electrical grid. The latest results, published by Ted Miguel, CEGA Affiliate Catherine Wolfram, and coauthors, found that average electricity consumption of households was low and that electrification had limited impacts on household socio-economic outcomes. The related LMCP study has been tracking the rollout of the Kenyan government’s high-profile “Last Mile” initiative to connect all rural households to electricity. Along with studying nationwide data, the LMCP project has been conducting a field experiment across 380 rural communities, to understand what political and economic factors may be shaping the provision of electricity.
In addition to collecting phone survey data on COVID-related outcomes, the REPP/LMCP teams are combining their samples to implement a new randomized evaluation that provides electricity subsidies or cash to households. The study aims to understand how access to electricity improves resilience during the economic crisis brought about by government restrictions during COVID-19.
