Join Global Insight Summer 2022 Brown Bag Series

Global Insight brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars and independent researchers to tackle our most sensitive questions in partnership with practitioners, policymakers, and donors. Global Insight work across sectors in fragile contexts to produce data-driven, gender-sensitive, multi-methods empirical research.

Join the Summer 2022 Brown Bag series which features timely research by our Principal Investigators.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been less deadly in Africa than in other contexts, the high level of existing precarity means the consequences were still severe, especially in terms of disruptions to livelihood activities. Further, a small but growing body of literature has documented gendered differences in these consequences. This study contributes to this line of research by exploring the extent to which COVID-19 restrictions had a different effect on men’s and women’s employment, food insecurity, and business income loss in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Surprisingly, our findings suggest that COVID-19 restrictions had similarly negative impacts on men’s and women's economic and material well-being. This may suggest that the economic precarity of families in sub-Saharan Africa meant women were not able to scale back paid work to accommodate changes in care work burdens. From this, it seems likely that women experienced a more intense double burden - continuing to maintain (or resume) income-generating activities while adapting to increased unpaid labor from having family members home instead of at work and school.

The Global Insight Summer 2022 Brown Bag Series starts this Wednesday, June 29th at 10 am ET. The team will be updating via LinkedIn, Twitter, and newsletter (subscribe here).