Reducing Income Inequality During the Pandemic: Findings from Countrywide Household Surveys on Informal Employment in Senegal

The paper provides an analysis of how income distribution in Senegal changed during the pandemic. It takes data from the wider FES-IDOS-IlO household surveys on informal employment in Sub-Saharan Africa and captures the income situation of people in informal employment in 2019 and 2022. Using nationally representative samples of 1200 households in both years, it shows that agriculture, rural households, and male peasants benefitted from income increases, while urban workers and women in farming lagged behind. The redistribution of income inequality was realized when the government implemented a substantive food aid project during COVID-19 and based its social relief programme on a ‘buying local’ strategy, thereby transferring budget expenditures into local producer income. Linking social relief to local production may be the single most cause to explain why poverty alleviation and income redistribution took place on such a massive scale.