![]() Second, the shock to earnings has led to a general decrease in the underlying resilience of households to future potential shocks-which could include the second wave of COVID-19 infections from which South Africa emerged in February 2021. Consistent with Jain et al., ( 2020b), this shock to labour market income appears to have affected household spending, with several respondents reducing consumption of essential food and non-food items. The shock also percolated through to those not directly affected by job or earnings losses, drying up distributional channels of support. While this shock to earnings and employment was experienced by almost all workers in our sample, the consequences appear especially severe and long-lasting for those in informal work, whether in wage labour or self-employment. First, consistent with prior quantitative evidence on the COVID-19 shock in South Africa (Jain et al., 2020a Ranchhod & Daniels, 2020a), we find that the pandemic was experienced first and foremost as a sudden and dramatic shock to labour markets. Our findings highlight three interrelated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis was supplemented by two key informant interviews that shed light on issues experienced at the broader community level. The interviews in this extension study focused on the impact of the pandemic on economic livelihoods and well-being. The sample was drawn from a previous qualitative study-consisting of in-depth life-history interviews and wealth ranking exercises-that we conducted in 2017. Our qualitative research strategy draws on two rounds of semi-structured interviews conducted between June and September 2020 with respondents residing in Khayelitsha, a large township on the outskirts Cape Town. Cape Town-with its poor, densely populated townships-and the surrounding Western Cape province quickly emerged as hotspots. ![]() Despite stringent confinement policies implemented to reduce contagion, COVID-19 infections in South Africa surged rapidly. The COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa was one of the earliest and strictest in global comparison (Gustafsson, 2020), causing a substantial disruption of labour markets, with already disadvantaged workers bearing the heaviest burden (Casale & Shepherd, 2020 Espi et al., 2020 Jain et al., 2020a Ranchhod & Daniels, 2020a Rogan & Skinner, 2020). We focus on South Africa as a case study. We present a snapshot of the quantitative evidence on the COVID-19 impact that has been gathered at the national level and enrich these findings by providing an in-depth qualitative analysis that explores the perceptions, coping strategies, and main challenges experienced by people who were highly vulnerable to the shock. We assess how the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy measures have affected people’s livelihoods, focusing on low-income and disadvantaged communities in urban South Africa, with the aim of providing a detailed ‘view from below’. However, to obtain a more granular understanding of the livelihood responses to the COVID-19 shock, there is much to gain by combining quantitative data with an analysis of detailed qualitative evidence. Much of the evidence for these effects has relied primarily on quantitative data collected through rapid telephone surveys. The inequality of the impact was acutely felt in the labour market, where workers in elementary occupations, those in the urban informal economy, and those without unemployment insurance have been most affected by distancing policies and the overall drop in consumer demand (Balde et al., 2020 Bassier et al., 2021 Espi et al., 2020 Jain et al., 2020a Lakuma & Nathan, 2020 Ranchhod & Daniels, 2020a Schotte et al., 2021). Early indications suggest that within countries, the impact of the pandemic has been unequal across households with differential access to income, assets, employment, health care, and social protection, as well as along gender lines (Adams-Prassl et al., 2020 Gisselquist & Kundu, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a devastating economic shock to livelihoods across the world.
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