The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly having short term and long term impact on Burkinabe households’ welfare, impacting households through at least three broad channels: (i) the income/employment channel, which includes both labor and non-labor income, (ii) the price channel, and (iii) the long-term human capital channel. Most of these impacts are related to the direct health effect, but also to the containment measures that systematically altered socio-economic activities, resulting in a reduction of income across the board. Due to the urgent need for timely data and the limits on face-to-face surveys, the World Bank and the National Institute of Statistics and Demography (INSD) decided to implement a high-frequency phone survey of national households (HFPS) (https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/3768) to monitor the effects of COVID-19 on households, leveraging the available household phone number in the 2018/19 Enquete Harmonisée sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages (EHCVM).
In Burkina Faso, the forcibly displaced persons (FDP) include both refugees and internal displaced population. For security related issues, FDPs are predominantly internal displaced people (IDPs). According to recent studies, the number of internally displaced people soared from 87,000 in January 2019 to over 1 million in August 2020, an increase of more than 1000 per cent (Conseil National de Secours d'Urgence et de Réhabilitation – CONASUR, 2020). The unprecedented levels of displacement occurred as the coronavirus pandemic worsens an already critical humanitarian crisis in the violence-stricken country. This critical situation calls for the need of timely data and analysis especially during a pandemic for this vulnerable group in order to better inform policy and targeting programs. Given the mutual interest of the INSD, WB-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement (JDC), UNHCR, and World Bank, decision was made to further expand the sample of the high-frequency phone survey of national households (HFPS) to include IDPs for a total of three consecutive rounds.
The core survey questionnaire of the Burkina Faso High Frequency Phone Survey on IDPs (BFA HFPS-IDP) is designed to cover important and relevant topics like employment, access to basic services and items, and non-labor sources of income. The core questionnaire is complemented by questions on selected topics that rotate each month, including knowledge of Covid-19 spread, social distancing and behavior, coping mechanisms to shocks, fragility, conflict and violence. Selected topics may be investigated more in detail in specific rounds.
The BFA HFPS-IDP is fielded alongside the Burkina Faso Covid-19 High Frequency Phone Survey of national households. Rounds 1, 2 and 3 of data collection for the HFPS-IDP occur simultaneously with round 9, 10 and 11 of the national HFPS operation, respectively.