Poverty is an indicator of paramount importance for gauging the socioeconomic well-being of a population. Especially during or after a shock, poverty estimates are invaluable for assessing the severity of the impact and for identifying which parts of the population were most affected. The...

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and...

Understanding the magnitude and importance of income shocks, such as drought or conflict, in causing and perpetuating poverty is critical to designing policies aimed at building resilience and contributing toward the goal of ending poverty. This paper uses micro-data from two waves of the Somali...

The High Frequency South Sudan Survey, implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided a long overdue update to...

Somalia is highly data-deprived, leaving policy makers to operate in a statistical vacuum. To overcome this challenge, the World Bank implemented wave 2 of the Somali High Frequency Survey to better understand livelihoods and vulnerabilities and, especially, to estimate national poverty...

Enumeration areas are the operational geographic units for the collection, dissemination, and analysis of census data and are often used as a national sampling frame for various types of surveys. Traditionally, enumeration areas are created by manually digitizing small geographic units on...

Interventions in highly insecure and fragile contexts are always confronted with the latent risk of not being able to implement the program as intended. Despite its high policy relevance, little is known about the impacts of program disruption or cancellation on beneficiaries. This study uses...

Small area poverty maps allow for the design of policies based on spatial differences in welfare. They are typically estimated based on a consumption survey reporting on poverty and a census providing the spatial disaggregation. This paper presents a new method which allows for the estimation of...

Violent conflict and instability affect men and women in heterogeneous ways, including differentiated impacts on economic, social, physical, and mental well-being. This study assesses the impact of the post-2013 conflict in South Sudan on adolescent girls and young women. The analysis uses data...