# **1 Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated many of the hardships faced by impoverished households. Due to their limited resources, households across Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly vulnerable to shocks, such as natural disasters and pandemics. While households cannot control their risk of exposure, they can employ _ex ante_ and _ex post_ coping strategies to mitigate the impact of realized risks and enhance their own resilience. For households in Sub-Saharan Africa, among whom formal insurance is uncommon, these coping strategies often involve reallocation of resources, monies, and labor within the family or household (Ellis, 1998). Households can diversify their incomes to bolster resilience to future shocks and uncertainty - an _ex ante_ coping behavior (Welderufael, 2014; Arslan et al., 2018; Khan and Morrissey, 2023) - or decide to diversify only after a shock exposes their vulnerability - an _ex post_ coping behavior (Asfaw et al., 2019; Mulwa and Visser, 2020; Cely-Santos and Hernández-Manrique, 2021).

We study the impact of livelihood diversification on mitigating food insecurity, a proxy for welfare, during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do this, we use household panel data collected by the World Bank, which combines face-to-face survey data collected in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria prior to the COVID-19 pandemic with monthly post-outbreak phone surveys. This allows us to establish causal relationships to understand how households coped with the impacts of the pandemic through livelihood diversification. Prior to the public release of the phone survey data, we prespecified our analysis and registered the pre-analysis plan with the Open Science Foundation (OSF) (Furbush et al., 2021). We report on the results of two research questions. First, how has household income composition and livelihood diversification changed since the onset of the pandemic? And second, how does household income composition and livelihood diversification impact household food insecurity amid the pandemic?<sup>1</sup> With respect to our first question, we interrogate the data and produce stylized facts regarding how livelihood diversification changes during the pandemic relative to pre-pandemic diversity. We do not observe a substantial nor a systematic change in household income composition nor livelihood diversification since the start of the pandemic. We do observe small differences in Ethiopia and Malawi, where households become more specialized during the pandemic than before. These changes are driven by a decline in the percent of households receiving remittances, government assistance, and wage income following the onset of COVID-19. This effect is relatively modest and we cannot disentangle whether this was a voluntary coping strategy or an involuntary separation from diverse activities (e.g., the loss of a wage job rather than leaving a wage job). In Nigeria, diversification increased slightly after the start of the pandemic, mainly due to increased participation in farming and greater government assistance. From these modest trends we conclude that

> 1In our pre-analysis plan, we specify a third research question: how do changes in income composition and livelihood diversification and subsequent effects on food insecurity vary across different population subgroups? We discuss findings related to this research question in the Online Appendix.

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