SU researchers lead multi-university study to track economic impacts of COVID-19

This week researchers at Stellenbosch University launched the Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (CRAM), a collaborative research project across five universities which will track the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 in South Africa. The study will survey a nationally representative sample of 10,000 South Africans every month for the next six months using telephone surveys with R20 airtime incentives per respondent per wave. The survey will focus on unemployment, household income, access to healthcare, child hunger and access to government grants. 

The Principal Investigator of the study, Dr Nic Spaull from the Economics Department at Stellenbosch, explained the rationale of the study and the collaborative nature of the work: “We know that the coronavirus pandemic is the largest economic shock in our lifetime and it’s already having profound social impacts on our country. When we started seeing the data coming out of China, Italy and Spain we knew this was going to devastate our economy and trigger a global recession.” This prompted Spaull and NRF Research Chair Servaas van der Berg to see what they could do: “I mean, we were all asking ourselves what we can do to help. What is the role of researchers when faced with a global pandemic and economic catastrophe? And maybe it’s just because we’re economists and when all you’ve got is a hammer everything looks like a nail, but we kept coming back to the same thing, we need good data. Practically all surveys have stopped because enumerators can’t go into the field and collect data…There won’t even be CPI data this year” Spaull said.

In order for the study to be nationally representative the researchers realized they’d need to use telephone surveys and to link the new study to a pre-existing survey. That would allow them to use the mobile phone numbers of existing sample participants: “In order to be nationally-representative we wanted to link into one of the existing surveys targeting income and social dynamics.  So I reached out to colleagues at UCT to find out about the possibility of extending the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) which is a nationally representative panel survey focusing on income. We wanted to include a mobile phone ‘update’ of NIDS to see how things are changing on the ground. Long story short, the Department of Planning Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) in the Presidency was incredibly helpful with facilitating permissions to use the data, as well as all the researchers at the Southern African Labour Development Research Unit (SALDRU) who were the implementing agent for previous waves of NIDS and now also co-investigators on the project and the implementing agent of NIDS-CRAM. It’s really been incredible to see how collaborative everyone has been.”

Fortuitously for the project, the Dean of the faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, Professor Ingrid Woolard, was one of the Principal Investigators of the NIDS study at UCT before she moved to Stellenbosch University. Prof Woolard says “NIDS has been collecting data on the same 28,000 people for more than a decade so we have very rich data on the life courses of these individuals prior to the COVID crisis. The CRAM data is going to provide a statistically rigorous picture of the devastation created by the virus in order to inform timeous and targeted policy interventions. It’s been tremendously encouraging to see how quickly DPME agreed to making the sample available for this important work.”