Community Rapid Assessment (CRA) on COVID-19

The Community Rapid Assessment (CRA) was a joint pilot led by the Evaluation Office and Social and Behavior Change Section.  The initiative took place in two (2) regions – Eastern and Southern Africa, and Southern Asia – with 14 participating countries.  In an effort to address the COVID-19 pandemic, the Evaluation Office conceptualized a remote data collection using high frequency mobile telephony data to survey populations and examine trust and behavior changes during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The short modules also examined how households coped during the pandemic, as well as tracked their emerging needs and as the pandemic evolves.  The sampling frames applies weight models to provide more reliable and representative data and was able to disaggregate the data by sex, age, urban/rural setting, and education.  The primary objective of this work is to provide rapid, community-sourced data in real-time in order to strengthen the evidence base and inform country-level programming in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings also demonstrated the value of deploying rapid analytic systems for emergencies like COVID-19 and highlighted the importance behavioral change data to inform decision-making and program design. 

This work is also done in collaboration with our external partners, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Statistics Without Borders.  Advanced inferential analysis were published in the Chance Journal, the American Statistical Journal with lessons learned from the exercise.  The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative published real time indicators between each round of data collection for public awareness.