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Young Lives phone survey to explore COVID-19 impacts on young people in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam

Young Lives, which recently received £9.4 million in new funding from DfID to continue their work, have rapidly revised their planned research activity in response to disruption caused by COVID-19, launching a new phone survey that will investigate the short-term impact of the pandemic on young people in their study countries.

Young Lives is a longitudinal study of childhood poverty following two cohorts of young people, now aged 19 and 25, in four countries, Ethiopia, India (the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam.

As a result of the pandemic, Young Lives have postponed their planned in person survey fieldwork by one year. Instead, the phone survey will investigate the short-term impact of COVID-19 on health and well-being, and on transitions to the labour market and higher education for the young people in the study.

The team will publish headline outcomes after each round of calls, providing rapid analysis to policy-makers. They are in a particularly strong position to inform policy makers because of their long-term relationship with participants, which enables them to collect high-quality information with significantly fewer refusals than is usual in a phone survey; the pro-poor nature of the samples, which enables them to focus on those families that are likely to be most affected by the crisis; and the four-country structure, which can show the differential impacts of COVID-19 according to varying contexts and related strategies implemented by governments.

The complete in-person Round 6 household survey will take place in 2021, enabling the team to explore the medium-long term impacts of COVID-19 too and the impact on outcomes not measured in the phone survey.  

Find out more.