Monitoring COVID-19 Impacts on Households in Sudan

The COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have worsened living conditions, particularly among the poor and the vulnerable. Hence, the World Bank designed and implemented a High-Frequency Phone Survey of Households (HFS) to help monitor the COVID-19 crisis and assess the dynamics of its impact on households in Sudan.

The survey was implemented jointly by Sudan’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and the World Bank. It was conducted using mobile phones¹ and covered both urban and rural areas across the 18 states of Sudan. Round 1 of data collection was conducted in June–July 2020, about three months after the declaration of the COVID-19 outbreak in Sudan and during lockdown. The same households were then called every two months for another five rounds.

The household survey covers questions on a range of topics and themes including, but not limited to: Knowledge of COVID-19 and social behavior; access to goods, education, and health services: food security, employment, income loss, subjective welfare, and coping strategies.

_{[1] The sampling frame is provided by the phone lists. Considerable efforts were made to compile the frame using multiple lists of phone numbers collected during the implementation of various projects/surveys during the last few years at the household level across the country.}