The Reach of the COVID-19 Crisis in Rwanda: Lessons from the RECOVR Survey

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have worked to reduce prevalence as well as to mitigate the socioeconomic impact of lockdown and other measures that have slowed down economic activity. To better understand the impact of the crisis on the Rwandan population, IPA ran the first round of our RECOVR survey in Rwanda from June 4-12. Similar to our approach in other RECOVR countries, we surveyed 1,482 respondents on a number of health, economic, and education outcomes by randomly dialing phone numbers in a sample that is representative of the set of active mobile phone numbers held by adults in Rwanda. A large portion of our respondents live in Kigali, the average age of the sample is 30, and 37 percent of respondents are female.This blog post summarizes the key findings and their policy implications. More information about the RECOVR survey, a cross-country panel survey that is tracking the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 over time in nine countries, is available here.