Event description
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, phone surveys have become commonplace in low- and middle-income countries. These surveys have had a transformative effect on national statistical and data systems by complementing traditional in-person survey infrastructure with high-frequency data collection on priority and urgent issues. High-frequency data offers insights that traditional, less frequent survey data collected in-person cannot offer. These data create new insights crucial to informing projects, designing policies, monitoring and evaluating programs, and advancing research successfully.
Over the past four years, the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) ¨C the World Bank¡¯s flagship household survey program ¨C has conducted nearly 230,000 interviews and almost 120 survey rounds to track households in urban and rural areas across six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as part of its High-Frequency Phone Surveys initiative (LSMS-HFPS). The LSMS-HFPS was initially launched in April 2020 to address data gaps resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, but has since evolved to facilitate routine monitoring of multiple and overlapping crises, such as health emergencies and extreme weather events, and their socioeconomic impacts on communities.
Through this extensive data collection effort, the LSMS-HFPS team developed a deep expertise addressing key practical and methodological challenges associated with conducting longitudinal high-frequency phone surveys in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.
This seminar will provide an overview of the LSMS-HFPS initiative as well as lessons learnt for running phone surveys and offer deep-dives into key topics of interest for data producers and data users in operations as well as research.
Chair
Talip Kilic ¡ª Senior Program Manager for the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), the World Bank¡¯s flagship household survey program housed at the Development Data Group.
In his managerial role, he oversees the extensive LSMS portfolio of face-to-face and phone survey data production, methodological and policy research, and capacity development activities.
As a researcher, he focuses on poverty, agriculture, labor, and gender in low- and middle-income countries, as well as survey methodology and data integration to improve the quality, timeliness, and policy-relevance of household and farm surveys. He was also a core member of the World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives.
Talip holds a PhD in Economics from the American University in Washington, D.C., and a BA of Arts in Economics and International Relations from Knox College.
Speaker
Amparo Palacios-Lopez ¡ª Program Manager at the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS).
She leads the Survey Methods Program of the LSMS.
Her primary area of research is development, with a focus on survey methods, gender, labor, poverty, and agriculture. The recent focus of her methodological research has been on labor, informality, consumption, and gender.
Amparo has a PhD in Development Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds a MA in Economics from the Pontificia Universidad Cat¨®lica de Chile.
Discussant
Shana Warren ¡ª Associate Director and Research Scientist at the research organization Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA).
She identifies opportunities to scale evidence-based development approaches and serves as a principal investigator on the Path-to-Scale Research (PSR) projects.
Her portfolio includes immunization and child health campaigns, social cohesion, and research methods. Shana is currently working on vaccine uptake interventions in Sierra Leone, and consumer protections in digital financial services in 10 Low- and Middle- Income Countries (LMICs). She was part of the team leading the IPA research in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shana holds a PhD in Politics from the New York University, an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a BA in History and French Studies from Rice University.