# Section 1. Introduction

Sahelian households face both unpredictable shocks and regular seasonal variation, which could have dramatic effects on their wellbeing. Shocks may be ‘covariate’ – hitting all community members at the same time (like droughts or floods) – or ‘idiosyncratic’ – affecting only certain households (like ill health or injury). Either way they can reduce households’ current and future welfare, as they may resort to negative coping strategies in response (Brunelin, Ouedraogo, & Tandon, 2020). Yet on top of these unpredictable shocks, livelihoods in the Sahel – most of which are in agriculture or pastoralism – also revolve around seasonal variation in rainfall, temperature, and other climatic conditions. In particular, households have to endure a ‘lean season’ when output from the agricultural cycle is low or herds may be lacking pasture.<sup>2</sup> Understanding how seasonal variation affects Sahelian households is essential for guiding policies that jointly seek to address chronic poverty, seasonality, and unexpected shocks. Poverty is widespread in the Sahel. Across the five countries considered in this paper – Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Senegal, and Chad – around one-third of people live on less than 1.90 USD 2011 PPP per day.<sup>3</sup> Social protection programs can help protect poor and vulnerable Sahelians from shocks and seasonality while addressing chronic poverty. With the development of government-led safety net systems in the region, there has also been growing body of evidence on the impacts of social safety nets on poverty reduction, food security, and livelihood opportunities for the poor and vulnerable. Recent impact evaluations of cash transfer programs conducted in Niger and Senegal have shown that regular cash transfers help poor households mitigate the adverse effects of shocks, including those that are climate related (Premand & Stoeffler, 2020; Bossuroy, et al., 2022). Yet adaptive safety net systems need to know how to weight efforts to address chronic poverty versus unpredictable shocks versus seasonality and what the best modalities are for providing households with assistance.

This paper uses new household survey data to examine Sahelian households’ susceptibility in more detail. In particular, the paper draws on the _‘Enquête Harmonisée sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages’_ (EHCVM) _,_ which collected harmonized data from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Chad during two distinct ‘waves’ throughout 2018 and 2019. These waves correspond approximately to the lean and nonlean seasons in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal, so comparing them reveals the impact of seasonality in those countries. In Chad the timing of data collection was different, so those sections of the paper making cross-season comparisons will not include Chad.<sup>4</sup> The 2018 rainy season, which would determine the extent of the 2019 lean season, was regarded as ‘above average’ in terms of the timing and reliability of rainfall, making it possible to isolate the additional impact of ‘regular’ seasonality over and above the effects of unpredictable weather shocks.<sup>5</sup> Descriptive statistics from the EHCVM data immediately hint at Sahelian households’ exposure to seasonality. The majority of households rely primarily on agriculture or pastoralism, and their income

> 2 Further details on seasonal variation in temperature, rainfall, livelihoods, and food prices can be found in Annex 2. 3 Using the 2018 poverty numbers and the 2020 population numbers reported in the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality platform, 27.5 percent of people in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Senegal, and Chad, live below the international poverty line of 1.90 USD 2011 PPP per person per day.

> 4 Chad is retained for the descriptive statistics on strategies for managing and coping with seasonality in Section 3. 5 See Annex 2 and in particular analysis by Action Contre La Faim (2018) and FEWS NET (2019) for information on the 2018 rainy season.

2