technologies, insurance, and practices to lessen the impact of a shock. For instance, irrigation infrastructure or certain farming practices could mitigate the impact of a mild drought on a farmer’s harvest. When a shock affects a household negatively, the types of ex post coping strategies available to it will determine its level of resilience, that is, whether it can bounce back or not. This could be in the form of savings or loans, assistance from family and friends, or formal social protection programs. When such options are not available, households must resort to reducing consumption or selling productive assets, both of which can have longer-term negative impacts on welfare. To mitigate the impact of shocks, households can ex ante choose to diversify their economic activities through a combination of agricultural and nonagricultural activities, the production of multiple or drought-resistant crops, and so on. However, these strategies are often insufficient to fully mitigate the impact of the shocks—particularly among households with low assets and high vulnerability to shocks. (Dercon 2002). Understanding the extent to which these strategies are available to and used by households across communities as well as their (in)effectiveness are important inputs for designing and reforming social protection programs.

However, a knowledge gap (driven largely by the data constraints) exists in our understanding of the prevalence of shocks and the strategies used to mitigate them by Sudanese households. Addressing this gap is an important first step towards reforming existing SSNs **.** This can be done by using data that enable identifying households that are vulnerable to shocks based on their profile, such as their source of livelihood or location, which increases their risk of exposure to shocks and their access to social protection. In the case of Sudan, these efforts are constrained by the lack of data (Kjellgren et al. 2014). The lack of data on measures of household welfare, prevalence of shocks, and coping strategies used to mitigate the impact of shocks significantly constrained the analysis of household vulnerability and resilience to shocks and its implications on the effects of shocks on their welfare. Recently, the Central Bureau of Statistics began conducting a household survey collecting data on these variables—the National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS) in 2009 and the National Household Baseline and Poverty Survey (NHBPS) in 2014/15. Both datasets contain information on household demographics, assets, consumption/expenditure, shocks experienced, coping strategies used, and agricultural activities making it possible to describe the prevalence of idiosyncratic shocks and the types of coping strategies used to mitigate them in each period and discuss changes overtime. However, it is not be possible to examine the dynamics in the effects of shocks on household welfare at household level. This is because both surveys have difference sampling frameworks in addition to political and geographic differences between the two periods- one being before the secession and the other being after. However, using cross-section regression techniques on the latest survey, it is possible to examine the effects of shocks on the welfare of Sudanese households to draw insights for policy.

This paper applies this framework to examine the impact of idiosyncratic and covariate shocks on the welfare of Sudanese households. Data on idiosyncratic or household level shocks such as floods/drought, sickness, crop/livestock loss, death of family member, fire, robbery, etc. are self-reported and provided in both surveys. We complement this data with information on covariate shocks such as flood/drought and conflict<sup>4</sup> obtained from additional data sources. In particular, state-level rainfall and conflict data is extracted from geo-referenced data overtime. Deviations of observed rainfall and conflict in specific years (such as the years for which there is household data) from historical levels can be constructed and used

> 4 A separate paper examined the effect of price shocks on the welfare of Sudanese households. For this reason, this paper only focuses on flood/drought and conflict as covariate shocks.

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