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COVID-19

We are committed to supporting decision-makers with timely data and evidence to help them respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our response to COVID-19

Follow guidance

Laterite is following the advice of public health authorities in the countries where we work. Most of our staff are working from home, and we have suspended all field work activities to comply with social distancing guidelines and travel restrictions.

Innovation

We are re-inventing our way of working, collecting and analyzing data, to continue delivering impactful research during this period. We are also developing new analytical tools to predict the trajectory of the crisis and tweaking existing research projects to generate relevant insights on the effects of COVID-19.

Agile partnerships

We are supporting our clients in any way we can to deliver actionable insights on how COVID-19 is affecting the communities and businesses they work with in East Africa, with a focus on phone surveys. Our teams are mobilized and responding to short- and medium-term requests.

COVID-19 projects

World Bank

Impacts on Ethiopian firms and households

Laterite was contracted to conduct two large-scale, high-frequency phone surveys with the goal of assessing the impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on Ethiopian households and businesses. The two surveys will reach 2,300 families and 200 firms in Amharic-speaking regions of Ethiopia. Laterite is managing the entire data collection campaign, from recruiting especially-trained enumerators, to daily quality monitoring, data cleaning and analysis.

First results and insights
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TechnoServe

Knowledge, attitudes and behaviors among coffee farmers

Laterite is carrying out high-frequency phone surveys to track the impacts of COVID-19 on over 2,000 coffee farmers in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe every two weeks over a 5 month period. The survey aims to understand the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors about COVID-19 among coffee farmers that are part of TechnoServe’s agronomy training programs, and to identify and track social and economic impacts.

IFPRI

Impacts on delivery of healthcare services

Laterite is conducting a phone survey with IFPRI to assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the delivery of health and nutrition services in rural Ethiopia. The data collected will help inform disruptions to healthcare delivery and adoption of precautionary health behaviors in 251 sub-districts operating Ethiopia’s PSNP social assistance program.

GAGE program

COVID-19 and behavior in adolescents

Laterite is implementing a large-scale phone survey for the GAGE program, designed to understand the knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral of adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as their primary female caregivers. The survey looks into disruptions in education, training or work, constraints to mobility and agency, as well as self-reported health, coping mechanisms and psychosocial well-being.

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Innovation

Predicting the trajectory of the pandemic with synthetic controls

We developed a new tool that adapts synthetic control methods to allow for comparative COVID-19 predictions.

The tool models the progression of the outbreak in a country of interest by creating a synthetic country – a combination of other countries – that has followed a similar COVID-19 trajectory. The experience of this synthetic country is then used to model what might happen in the country of interest in the near future.

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