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Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face survey data collection efforts came to a halt due to lockdowns, limitations on mobility and social distancing requirements. What followed was a surge in phone surveys to fulfill rapidly evolving needs for timely and policy-relevant microdata for understanding the socioeconomic impacts of and responses to the pandemic. Even as the face-to-face survey data collection efforts are resuming in different parts of the world with COVID-19 safety protocols, the rapidly-acquired experience with phone surveys on the part of national statistical offices and survey practitioners in low- and middle-income countries appears to have formed the foundation for phone surveys to be more commonly implemented in the post-pandemic era, in response to other shocks and as complementary efforts to face-to-face surveys. Informed by the practical experience with the high-frequency phone surveys that have been implemented with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) to monitor the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provides an overview of options for the design and implementation of phone surveys to collect representative data from households and individuals. Further, the discussion identifies the requirements for phone surveys to be a mainstay in the toolkits of national statistical offices and the directions for future research on the design and implementation of phone surveys.

This paper uses comparable income aggregates from 41 national household surveys from 22 countries to explore the patterns of income generation among rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to compare household income strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa with those in other regions. The paper seeks to understand how geography drives these strategies, focusing on the role of agricultural potential and distance to urban areas. Specialization in on-farm activities continues to be the norm in rural Africa, practiced by 52 percent of households (as opposed to 21 percent of households in other regions). Regardless of distance and integration in the urban context, when agro-climatic conditions are favorable, farming remains the occupation of choice for most households in the African countries for which the study has geographically explicit information. However, the paper finds no evidence that African households are on a different trajectory than households in other regions in terms of transitioning to non-agricultural based income strategies.