# 1. Introduction

Civil war broke out across The Republic of South Sudan in December 2013 only two years after gaining independence on the 9<sup>th</sup> of July 2011. The South Sudanese conflict has since continued to escalate, resulting in a large‐scale humanitarian crisis where more than a third of the population has been forcibly displaced (World Bank, 2018).<sup>2</sup> Given the extremely difficult context, very little was known about welfare and livelihoods during the early years of the country’s independence in 2011.<sup>3</sup> The last nationally representative household survey measuring consumption and poverty was conducted as far back as 2009. To fill this data gap, the High Frequency South Sudan Survey (HFS), implemented by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in collaboration with the World Bank and funded by the U.K. Department for International Development, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017 (Appendix A). In the period prior to and during the first wave of the HFS in 2015, conflict had primarily been concentrated in the Greater Upper Nile region (Figure 12in Appendix D).<sup>4</sup> This period of relative stability across the remaining Greater Equatoria and Greater Bah El‐Ghazal regions allowed the preparation and relatively calm implementation of Waves 1 and 2 of the country in 2015 and early 2016.

In summer 2016, clashes broke out in Juba. The escalation of the conflict coincided with the beginning of the implementation of Wave 3 of the HFS, a second urban‐rural representative wave measuring consumption and poverty. The third wave of the HFS provides a relatively rare and extremely valuable glimpse of trends in welfare, consumption, and poverty in a country going through a period of upheaval. Indeed, the South Sudanese economy has since displayed all the characteristics of a war economy, including severe output contraction, rapid currency devaluation, and soaring inflation (FAO and WFP, 2017; International Monetary Fund, 2016). Unsurprisingly, driven by these powerful shocks the incidence of poverty has risen to extremely high levels. In 2016, the HFS estimated that more than 4 in 5 people across seven of the ten former states were living under the international poverty line of US$ 1.90 PPP 2011 (82 percent). Such high levels of deprivation are not merely a direct result of the crisis but also reflect a history of instability, characterized by a poorly functioning state and a lack of institutional services provision (de Vries and Schomerus, 2017; de Waal, 2014; World Bank, 2017). In 2017 South Sudan ranked 187 of 189 countries in the Human Development Index, with a life expectancy of merely 57 years.<sup>5</sup> The HFS was designed with the expectation of potential instability and thus capitalized on recent technological and methodological innovations to obtain reliable national poverty statistics in difficult contexts.<sup>6</sup> Closely monitoring fieldwork is key to implementing such a large project in a risky context. The HFS leveraged the expansion of cellular networks across South Sudan to build a near real‐time monitoring system, whereby the data could be uploaded daily to a dedicated server and checked for consistency. Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) also allowed built‐in consistency checks, eliminating the need for expensive and potentially dangerous re‐visits. Adherence to the sample design can be closely monitored with GPS software, tracking enumerators inside and outside areas with mobile phone coverage. The HFS also leveraged innovations in questionnaire design which permitted reducing the number of consumption items asked to the respondents while still obtaining unbiased poverty estimates through

> 2 See, UNOCHA: https://www.unocha.org/south‐sudan  &  UNHCR: http://data.unhcr.org/SouthSudan/regional.php

> 3 Not only has insecurity made fieldwork dangerous, but much of the South Sudanese population lives in isolated and hard to access areas. More than 85 percent of the 12 million South Sudanese reside in sparsely populated rural areas connected by a mere 200 km of paved roadways – about 2 percent of all roads – spanning an area of 650,000 square kilometers, approximately the size of France (Pape et al. 2017; African Development Bank 2013). The poor state of infrastructure combined with the size of the country means nationally representative surveys are expensive and time‐consuming.

> 4 The Greater Upper Nile region was where the opposition forces, the SPLM‐IO, kept their stronghold and were thus contested in the fighting. In Appendix Figure 11 this region corresponds to the non‐HFS states, where the number of conflict events in non‐ HFS covered states is much greater throughout 2014. During the year 2015 the conflict lost some of its intensity. Especially in the HFS states, where although conflict events continued to be recorded most of the violence remained concentrated, particularly in a few select areas which were relatively close to the border with the non‐HFS states (Figure 12).

> 5 UNDP Human development index, available at: http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI; and World Development Indicators.

> 6 For a comprehensive review of issues in data collection in fragile and conflict situations see Mneimneh et al., (2016).

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