The global Young Lives team planned to conduct Round 6 of our household survey in 2020. Unable to continue with this due to the pandemic and associated restrictions, the team moved to an innovative Phone Survey to provide rapid headline outcomes about the impact of COVID-19 on young people in our study countries. We published findings from the first of three calls in this survey in August. Headlines from these findings were also published by The Conversation here. Short reports from the Second and Third Call will be published later this year. These outputs aim to inform global and national policy responses to the crisis, and provide longer term analysis on the affect of the pandemic on young people’s transitions to adulthood in our study countries.
Young Lives' Response to COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic caused Young Lives to urgently review our research and policy priorities and we have made ambitious adaptations to our 2020 programme. The team is also highlighting the impact of COVID-19 on the young people in our study through a series of publications, blogs and articles.
With 91 percent of children and young people out of school due to COVID 19, we adapted our planned education and gender research, introducing a phone survey with head teachers. We conducted interviews with school leaders in India and Ethiopia to find out about their teaching and learning priorities and strategies during school closures and to what extent these were equally accessible to all children. We published headline findings and national policy reports here. We have collaborated with other key researchers in conducting school leader surveys and will disseminate findings jointly.
Young Lives qualitative longitudinal work, conducted with a smaller group of the main cohort in each country, is currently researching the way gender and poverty interact in transitions to adulthood, and influence diverging trajectories through education, work and first-time marriage. Although these qualitative data were collected prior to COVID-19, we are refocussing some of our analysis on related current concerns for youth in low – and middle – income countries, such as: experiences of shocks; economic precarity and informal labour; access to sexual and reproductive health and rights; and explaining vulnerability and ‘resilience’ among marginalized youth.
Young Lives’ longitudinal approach offers a long-term perspective to development problems, enabling critical connections to be made between early experiences and later outcomes. Young Lives is uniquely positioned to provide rapid information on the short term impacts of COVID-19 and measured analysis on the longer term outcomes of this current crisis.
