SEATTLE, Washington — To promote research-driven policy and focus attention on middle and low-income countries, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) launched a new program in April 2020. The program called Research for Effective COVID-19 Responses (RECOVR), aims to generate and consolidate COVID-19 global poverty research, partnerships and resources for policymakers. The project fits into IPA’s larger mission to use research to influence policymakers and global debates about poverty and to scale successful solutions to global poverty. The RECOVR research initiative looks specifically at the effects of COVID-19 in impoverished nations and examines the effectiveness of early policies to mitigate the virus’s economic impact.
COVID-19’s Economic Toll
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to push people all over the world into poverty, new projections from the World Bank show increasingly bleak pictures of the pandemic’s economic effects, particularly in already impoverished regions. The World Bank initially anticipated that COVID-19 would push between 40 million and 60 million people around the globe into extreme poverty, but is now adjusting this projection significantly, expecting between 71 million and 100 million people to fall into extreme poverty, using the international poverty standard of $1.90 a day and below. The hardest-hit regions are predicted to be South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific.
RECOVR Research Initiative: Focus
The RECOVR initiative focuses on the 22 countries that are anticipated to be hardest hit by COVID-19 due to the countries’ existing levels of poverty, as COVID-19 global poverty research by The World Bank found that a large portion of the newly extremely impoverished, will be in countries that were already struggling with high rates of extreme poverty. As the IPA explains, as is evidenced by the trajectory of early-hit areas like Europe, swift and evidence-based policy is the most effective in mitigating the harm of COVID-19 and must inform governments as the epicenter of the pandemic shifts and impoverished countries are hit harder.
The program outlines seven impact goals, including both high-level goals like reducing COVID-19 transmission and promoting peace and recovery, as well as more focused goals that pay special attention to vulnerable groups. RECOVR’s mission specifically addresses the needs of children, who UNICEF has identified as a particularly vulnerable group. UNICEF found that COVID-19 could push 86 million children into household poverty by the end of 2020, which is a 15% increase from previous trends. These children will lack access to education, healthcare, food and other essential resources as a result. The initiative also takes a particular focus on women’s health, as the World Health Organization reports that both poverty and times of emergency, tend to put a higher burden on women’s health and access to healthcare.
How RECOVR Works
The RECOVR research initiative includes three main projects: fueling and consolidating COVID-19 global poverty research, advising governments and creating partnerships across the policy and research sectors.
Conducting and Compiling Research: The research featured in RECOVR’s database, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, explores both how the virus is directly affecting people’s livelihoods in these 22 countries and how policy interventions and social programs have helped to cope with the pandemic. The online database includes both IPA-conducted and other research, funding opportunities, results and analysis as well as research materials to help other entities conduct independent research.
Generating and Improving Research Conducting: RECOVR has generated surveys and questionnaires for its partners, other researchers and policymakers to use for conducting streamlined and useful research, the main two being the RECOVR Survey and Economic Impact Survey, both of which are being rolled out in over eight countries. In addition, the IPA is gathering data on research methods to eventually release guidelines for research conducting, to make COVID-19 global poverty research more efficient and meaningful.
Advising Policy and Creating Partnerships: All COVID-19 global poverty research is compiled and conducted through RECOVR with the intention of informing policy and policymakers. The IPA has partnered with ministries in more than 15 countries to work on incorporating evidence-based research in the COVID-19 response. The IPA reported that it found that the most urgent desire of its partners is data-informed advice. In addition to creating a database of research for policymakers to access, the IPA is working directly with governments in combination with Y-RISE, a Yale research initiative that researches the effectiveness of poverty policy around the world, by making policy briefs and policy response reports to present data to political leaders.
Overall, the goals and focus of the RECOVR research initiative make it a promising program to help in alleviating poverty during COVID-19 and reach those who need help the most.
– Emily Rahhal