Gender Differences in Household Coping Strategies for COVID-19 in Kenya

Understanding how different households cope with COVID-19 among a vulnerable populationis important for the policy design aiming at relieving hunger and poverty in a low income setting. This paper usesoriginal household data from five waves of a phone survey conducted between May 2020 and June 2021 in Kenya (samplesize 31,715) and investigates the gender differences in household coping strategies during the COVID-19 shock. Itfinds that female-headed households are less likely to cope by selling assets or taking loans, compared with male-headedhouseholds. Instead, femaleheaded households rely more on social networks to cope. No difference in coping by reducingmeals is observed across these two types of households. This paper documents that the reasons behind the genderdifference include that female-headed households are poorer, and they are more likely to rely on friends and family tocope with shocks even prior to the COVID-19 shock. The findings suggest that widowed and divorced women are in highneed of relief programs, and governments should provide easily accessible loans to avoid negative impacts in thelong term from households selling assets.