Chronic Poverty Report 2023: Pandemic Poverty

Abstract

The Chronic Poverty Report 2023: Pandemic Poverty sets out to investigate the highly negative effects of the Covid-19 restrictions, and most importantly, the success or otherwise of the measures pursued to mitigate those effects on people in and near poverty. The leading message is that if restrictions were necessary, they should be minimised, and complemented by measures to mitigate their negative effects.

During the pandemic, such measures were in most countries completely inadequate to prevent impoverishment and downward socio-economic mobility. The report makes suggestions on what needs to be done in a similar future crisis to avoid the economic and social reversals we have seen since 2020, and some steps on the road to recovery. This first CPAN report on Pandemic Poverty is the product of a long-term partnership across 18 countries in the global south. 12 of those countries participated in the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network’s Covid-19 Poverty Monitoring Initiative. These revisited life history respondents from pre-pandemic qualitative research and caught up with their lived experiences during the pandemic. This was designed as a people centred complement to the high-frequency phone surveys which were undertaken in many countries during the pandemic.

Authors from some of the same countries and others based at the Institute of Development Studies, were involved in writing this report. They carried out key informant interviews with policymakers and implementers to track and understand the development of policy responses during the pandemic, and to analyse the policy discourses in each country. The co-authors met monthly for six months while the report was being written to ensure coherence.