The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked a havoc on the livelihoods of the country’s young populations with nearly 70 per cent of them witnessing a fall in income. A recent study explored that the drastic fall in incomes prompted a group of most vibrant economic actors to change their jobs. As coping strategies, most of them relied on borrowings, savings and extra work to tide over the crisis. Unusual prices of daily commodities emerged as the biggest shock among the surveyed households during the pandemic. The government and NGOs have been providing support to tackle the economic impact of Covid-19 but this is insufficient to make any significant change to make livelihood sustainable.
The survey findings disclosed at a webinar on Tuesday stated that some 69.76 per cent employed respondents reported that their monthly salary had decreased while 4.52 per cent of the surveyed respondents reported that the main earning member of the family had named to a different profession either because of low wage or wage cut or loss of employment. Regarding self-employment, almost one-third of households claimed that their business had to be closed either permanently or temporarily since March 2020. Several reasons were identified as reasons behind the business closures. Those were the economic lockdown, lack of demand, fall in price, increased cost of production, Covid-19 related additional costs and so on. Affected-people adopted a number of coping strategies: 40 per cent relied on borrowing, 39.4 per cent resorted to using up savings, 21.3 per cent worked extra hours, 12.3 per cent sold their animal stock, 9.9 per cent changed dietary patterns and 8.3 per cent relied on unconditional help offered by relatives and friends.
Small and medium enterprises, youths and women have emerged as the most adversely impacted groups. As the existing social protection programs are not enough to tackle the new challenges induced by the pandemic, the government and development partners should invest in productive sectors to create employment for the hard-hit groups of the population.
