# **Introduction**

**In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant income loss, disrupted value chains, and reallocated resources toward short-term measures to fight the pandemic.** While the health impacts of the illness were moderate, with the exception of South Africa, the economic impacts have been significant (Calderon and Kobata 2021). Mobility restrictions were widely implemented, severely disrupting economic activity, whether by preventing people from going to work and earning a wage or by prohibiting the self-employed from engaging in commerce (Khamis et al. 2021). Associated disruptions in supply chains, trade patterns, and fiscal spending further affected product markets and related jobs. The persistence of the disruptions, as the COVID-19 virus morphed into new strains, led to a long-term suppression of economic activity in SSA. The disruptions created by the pandemic pushed the region into the first recession in 25 years (Aga and Maemir 2021).

**Urban non-farm household enterprises in SSA were particularly vulnerable to the shock.** Recent high-frequency phone surveys in four African countries found that 86 percent of urban and rural non-farm household enterprises (NFHE) lost income due to the pandemic, as compared to 62 percent of farm households and 54 percent of wage-earning households (Contreras-Gonzalez et al. 2021). Khamis et al. (2021) found similar results using a larger sample, reporting that, when taking a simple average across nine countries in SSA, 82 percent of those with NFHE reported an income loss in the early stages of the crisis. This is particularly worrisome as most urban workers in Africa (70 percent, by ILO (2018) estimates) are engaged in mostly informal NFHEs. They are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19-induced shutdowns since they rarely have private risk management strategies due to their small size and low, irregular earnings (Guven et al. 2021). They also tend to not be connected to social protection systems, particularly in urban areas where the prevalence of safety nets and cash transfer programs has been meager as compared to rural Africa (Gentilini et al. 2021, Bossuroy et al. 2017). Finally, they are more affected by global economic fluctuations, compared to rural households, because of the nature of their economic activities being more exposed to international markets.

**Within the NFHE sector, and the informal sector more generally, certain demographic groups may have experienced particular hardship.** In the SSA region, 78 percent of employed women work in the non-farm informal sector, compared to 67 percent of men (ILO 2018). Employed women’s work tends to be concentrated in face-to-face services (Madgavcar et al. 2020), including food service, hospitality, retail and wholesale, all of which were disproportionately affected during the shutdowns and mobility restrictions. Women were further saddled by an increase in home care<sup>1</sup> – tending to children whose schools had closed, caring for family members who were sick with COVID-19, and home production of goods and services that may have been difficult to procure due to the shutdowns and disrupted supply chains – that required diverting time and financial resources away from their businesses (Goldstein et al. 2020). Indeed, preliminary evidence from phone surveys from 40 developing countries finds that women were disproportionately affected by employment loss (Kugler et al. 2021). The same study suggests that

> 1 https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/global-state-small-business-during-covid-19-gender-inequalities

2