Our poverty analysis reveals several nuanced patterns and heterogeneities. For 2020, the pandemic has increased the extreme poverty rate – defined as those living on less than $1.90 a day in 2011 PPP terms – in Africa by 1.5-1.7 percentage points, relatively smaller than early estimates and projections. For example, Sumner et al. (2020) predicted between 2.6 and 11.2 percentage points increase in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, and most importantly, we also show significant differences in the impacts across countries and regions. Countries affected by Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) have suffered most, experiencing a 2.1 percentage point increase in extreme poverty. This is intuitive given that conflict remains a major driver of poverty in Africa (Corral et al., 2020) and that political instability and conflicts have been increasing in Africa recently. The World Bank’s 2021 fiscal year FCV report designates 21 of the 54 countries in Africa as affected by some form of conflict or fragility. Fragilities and conflicts are likely to reduce governments’ capacity for social protection responses to the crisis while also prolonging the recovery of economies. Consistent with several other studies, we also find significant heterogeneities across rural and urban areas. Despite some differences across countries, urban households suffered more than rural households.

Our review of the mitigating role of social protection programs in Africa generated several insights. Despite variations across countries, several African countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing and reforming a combination of existing social protection programs, unemployment insurance, and other rescue packages to support those affected by the pandemic (Gentilini et al., 2020; Abay et al., 2021a; Gronbach et al., 2022; Duchoslav and Hirvonen, 2021; Banerjee et al., 2021; Brooks et al., 2021; Alloush et al., 2022). Although the evidence base on their protective role remains scant, some studies show that social protection programs have protected the welfare of vulnerable households. For example, Abay et al. (2021a) show that Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net (PSNP) absorbs much of the adverse effects of the pandemic on PSNP beneficiaries. Similarly, Banerjee et al. (2020) show that a universal basic income (UBI) scheme in rural Kenya during the pandemic had moderate effects on food security as well as physical and mental health while Brooks et al. (2021) and Kimani et al. (2020) show positive impacts of a one-time cash transfer in Kenya and Uganda, respectively.

However, the pandemic also uncovered important vulnerabilities in social protection programming in Africa. First, delivering social protection and safety net transfers while practicing social distancing has been challenging for several countries that had no digital delivery systems. Second, while social protection programs in Africa have reached some during the pandemic, many of the poor remained unreached because of the limited scale and coverage of these programs. Third, because social protection programs in Africa have traditionally focused on rural areas (Beegle et al., 2018), they were not sufficiently reaching urban households who were disproportionately affected by the pandemic and associated lockdown measures. Fourth, targeting of social protection amid unfolding an pandemic is a daunting task, leaving these programs 4