Policy Research
Blogs
World Bank Holds Stakeholder Sensitization Workshop in Nigeria
The World Bank's National Social Safety Net Coordinating Office (NASSCO), in conjunction with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), convenved a workshop on the 2018/2019 Nigeria Living Standards Survey (NLSS), on September 20 in Keffi, Nigeria. The workshop was attended by national and international stakeholders.Read More
National Household Forest Survey - Liberia
Enumerator training for the National Household Forest Survey in Liberia has commenced! LSMS's Sydney Gourlay and Josefine Durazo are supporting the World Bank Country Office in Monrovia, the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services (LISGIS) and the Forestry Development Authority... Read More
Malawi Data Now Available
The Malawi National Statistical Office (NSO), in collaboration with the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), disseminated the findings from the Fourth Integrated Household Survey 2016/17 (IHS4), and the Integrated Household Panel Survey 2016 (IHPS), on November 22, 2017 in... Read More
The Dirty Truth: Measuring Soil Health
The importance of soil health in agrarian societies is indisputable – soil health has a direct relationship with agricultural productivity and sustainability. Yet, its highly complex nature renders it much more challenging to measure than other agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers or pesticides... Read More
If You Pay Your Survey Respondents, You Just Might Get a Different Answer
When I was doing my dissertation fieldwork, the professor I was working with and I had a fair number of conversations about compensating the respondents in our 15 wave panel survey. We were taking a fair amount of people’s time and it seemed like not only the right thing to do, but also a way to... Read More
Publications
Journal Article
Shelter from the Storm? Household-Level Impacts of, and Responses to, the 2015 Floods in Malawi
As extreme weather events intensify due to climate change, it becomes ever more critical to understand how vulnerable households are to these events and the mechanisms households can rely on to...
Paper
The Cost of the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda
Women comprise a large proportion of the agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from 30 to 80 percent (FAO 2011). Yet women farmers are consistently found to be less productive than...
LSMS Guidebook
Measuring the Role of Livestock in the Household Economy
This Guidebook presents a module template for effectively including livestock in multi-topic and agricultural household surveys in low- and middle-income countries. It is a practical tool for survey...
WB Working Paper
Dynamics of Off-Farm Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Gender Perspective
Off-farm income constitutes a significant share of the household livelihood portfolios across Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the determinants and dynamics of individuals' participation in off-farm...
WB Working Paper
Eyes in the Sky, Boots on the Ground: Assessing Satellite- and Ground-Based Approaches to Crop Yield Measurement and Analysis in Uganda
Crop yields in smallholder systems are traditionally assessed using farmer-reported information in surveys, occasionally by crop cuts for a sub-section of a farmer's plot, and rarely using full-plot...