<p>This project examines the economic impact of COVID-19 lockdown policies in Jordan.It focuses on the distributional impacts across vulnerable segments of society, including refugees and informal workers.The methodology is unique in that it merges a bimonthly panel survey among&nbsp;4,000 respondents with high-frequency cellphone metadata for the universe of users on one of Jordan's largest telecommunications companies.</p>

<p>Informational deficits constrain the ability of governments, service-providers and funders to make evidence-based decisions about how best to respond to the evolving needs of rural populations, and challenges to food security in developing countries, associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD) proposes to conduct a multi-country survey of up to 11,000 smallholder farmers, and a sample of agro-dealers, to assess the impact of the pandemic and mitigation efforts.PAD is uniquely positioned to conduct this work given the organization’s existing operational footprint, experience in designing and administering digital informational services, and research capabilities.</p>

<p>The lockdown in South Asia has led to mass migration of people back to their home towns/villages as the work opportunities in urban centres shrink or are no longer available.This poses a public health risk to rural areas as migrants may spread the virus when they return and these areas are ill-prepared to handle the crisis due to poor healthcare infrastructure.Preliminary analysis by Shonchoy (2020) has shown that this is indeed likely since the outbreaks outside of Dhaka have been strongly correlated with migration patterns, potentially due to returning migrants bringing the disease from Dhaka, Chittagong or internationally.</p>