started rising rapidly. The paper finds that the transfer led to increase in reopening of businesses that had temporarily closed, increase in business profits by a third of the decline observed in the first months of the pandemic, and increase in household food expenditures. Spending on personal protective equipment (PPE) also increased in the treatment sample, but only among those who perceived COVID-19 a major health risk, which suggests potential complementarity between cash transfers and information campaigns to reduce the risk of contagion while minimizing impacts on economic activities.

Abay et al. (2021a) study whether the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) played a positive role in protecting beneficiaries of the program from the malign impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security. The authors combine a pre-pandemic face-to-face survey and a phone survey conducted during the pandemic to compare the evolution of food security outcomes of beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries before and after the onset of the pandemic. They find that food insecurity increased significantly less among PSNP beneficiaries, especially for poor households and those living in remote areas. They also find that PSNP beneficiaries were less likely to reduce expenditure on education, health, and agricultural inputs. Strupat (2021) employs a similar difference-in-differences strategy to study the impacts of the National Safety Net Programme (NSNP) and the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP) in Kenya. The study combines nationally representative in-person surveys before and after the first wave of COVID-19 in Kenya to study impacts of the programs on household incomes, coping strategies and social cohesion. The study finds that beneficiaries experienced lower loss of incomes, and they did not sell their assets to cope with the impacts of the pandemic. Social cohesion, measured in terms of trust in government and parliament as well as cooperation with others to do voluntary work, remained stable among beneficiaries but declined significantly among non-beneficiaries. These findings suggest that existing social protection programs can play a key protective role during covariate shocks such as COVID-19.

Kimani et al. (2020) worked with GiveDirectly to implement an unconditional cash transfer program in a Refugee Settlement in Uganda. The researchers employed a randomized staggered design where the study sample is divided into 24 cohorts and beneficiaries in each cohort receive a one-time lumpsum grant of $1,000 in monthly intervals. The first cohort received transfers about a month before the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in Uganda in March 2020 and lockdown measures were put in place. The paper found that though food insecurity generally increased during the pandemic, households who received transfers before the pandemic were less affected (and hence less food insecure). The study also found that mask wearing was higher among cash recipients, who reported higher perception of the risk of contracting COVID-19.

Alloush et al. (2022) examined the effects of South Africa’s Older Person’s Grant program on economic and psychological well-being during the pandemic. They exploit an age-eligibility criteria to identify the impacts of access to this program and show that beneficiary households reported improved 23