Leveraging the World Bank LSMS-ISA Program and Other Pre-COVID-19 Household Surveys for Design and Analysis of Phone Surveys

Activities in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda

In these five countries, the phone surveys leverage the ongoing World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative and its infrastructure.

In each country, the phone survey aims to conduct monthly phone interviews, for a period of 12 months, with a national sample of households that had been interviewed during the latest round of the LSMS-ISA-supported national longitudinal household survey. In each country, the implementing agency for the phone survey is the respective national statistical office (NSO) – with the exception of Ethiopia, where the World Bank has hired a private firm with clearance from the Central Statistical Agency.

This model leverages a decade of LSMS-ISA investment in the capacity of national statistical offices to design and conduct longitudinal household surveys. By enabling the partner national statistical offices to respond to the emergency data needs by re-orienting the existing LSMS-ISA longitudinal surveys, as opposed to building new, parallel systems of data collection, it promotes sustainability, and can easily be replicated at scale in other geographical areas.

Activities in Burkina Faso and Mali

Each phone survey in Burkina Faso and Mali aims to conduct monthly phone interviews, for a period of 12 months, with a national sample of household that had been interviewed during the 2018/19 round of the cross-sectional survey that had been conducted under the West Africa Regional Program to Harmonize and Modernize Living Conditions Survey. In each country, the implementing agency for the phone survey is the respective NSO.

In each LSMS-ISA country as well as in Burkina Faso and Mali, the technical assistance to the phone survey is provided by a team of experts from the LSMS and the World Bank Poverty and Equity GP.

The LSMS-supported phone surveys are part of the broader group of World Bank-supported high-frequency phone surveys, including in other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia and Pacific. The LSMS team is working closely with the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice in support of this global effort.

At the country-level, beyond the aforementioned operations in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda, the LSMS team members are providing specialized technical assistance to phone surveys in Cabo Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.

At the global-level, the LSMS team has been contributing to the development of a set of harmonized instruments and tools that can be readily adopted by as many countries and implementers as possible with little initial fixed costs. These are available in the “Resources” section below.

Resources

• Overview of the High-Frequency Phone Surveys initiative
• Guidelines on sampling for high-frequency phone surveys
• A questionnaire template, with core and optional modules, accompanied by an overview and a manual
• Guidelines on the implementation of CATI-based data collection
• Tools for Automated Management of Phone Surveys [English]; [French]

For more resources visit the World Bank DEC’s COVID-19 research site to find real-time data, statistical indicators, and a data dashboard relevant to COVID-19.

Over the period of July 2020-June 2021, these resources will be complemented with additional World Bank Survey Solutions CATI software features, and the LSMS-led R-, Python- and Stata-based tools that facilitate the management of CATI surveys – these tools will also be made publicly available.

Conducting Policy and Methodological Research Using Pre-COVID-19 LSMS-ISA and Phone Survey Data

In addition to the production of reports specific to each phone survey round, the LSMS has established several task forces focused on the analysis of pre-COVID-19 LSMS-ISA and phone survey data to produce cross-country policy briefs and working papers. The current list of research topics include: (i) survey methodology, (ii) agriculture and food security, (ii) knowledge, behavior and livelihoods, (iv) education, (v) work and employment, and (vi) gender. The task force outputs will be disseminated publicly.