G2LM|LIC - UYOP: Uganda Youth Opportunity Program - COVID-19 Survey

This study does examine the resilience of young micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector and their families in rural Uganda against the COVID-19 shock. More specifically, the study investigates how firms have built up considerable amounts of physical and human capital over the past decade versus those that have not. The survey focuses on economic resilience and how it relates to skilled labor and assets. It also provides information on the impact of COVID-19 on frequently discussed outcomes (e.g. health status, food security, urban-rural migration).


The study measures the very long-run impact of the Youth Opportunity Program (YOP), a cash grant program designed to set up its recipients as craftspeople in 2008. The Government of Uganda delivered grants of $388 per person and vocational training opportunities to youth in northern Uganda to start small enterprises. YOP invited groups of young adults, aged roughly 16 to 35, to apply for cash grants to start a skilled trade, such as carpentry or tailoring. In 2008 applicants for the YOP were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The experimental design creates two balanced groups of young entrepreneurs that differ only in whether they received a cash grant from YOP and therefore provides a reliable source of causal identification. The research team found large impacts on skilled employment, income, consumption, and assets 2- and 4-years after the grants were distributed (Blattman et al. 2014). In a 9-year follow-up, they confirmed that the intervention had lasting effects on assets, skilled labor, and whether recipients effectively owned their business, while the positive income and consumption effects after four years proved to be of short-term nature only (Blattman et al. 2020).

Survey & Sampling

The survey was conducted in two rounds. The first round of interviews took place via phone in July and August 2020. The second round took place in September and October 2020. In the second round, different groups were interviewed with different questionnaires and methods A subsample of participants that had been successfully reached in the first round was randomly selected to be reinterviewed first by phone (Group 1), and again in person a week later (Group 2). The phone interviews were conducted using the same questionnaire as in the first round, while a shorter questionnaire but with a more detailed employment and income section was used for the in-person interviews (Group 2).


A random sample of individuals (n=603) that could not be reached in the first round in person was also interviewed. Among these sampled individuals, some were randomly assigned to be interviewed with the full questionnaire and the detailed employment and income section (Group 3) while the remaining individuals (Group 4) were asked the questions from the first round. The sampling does not claim to be representative of certain groups in Uganda. Rather, the sample consists of individuals who were part of the YOP government program from 2008 and were interviewed in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2017.

G2LM|LIC Research Project G2LM|LIC - UYOP: Uganda Youth Opportunity Program - COVID 19 Survey, 2020. Research Data Center of IZA (IDSC). Version 1.0. doi:10.15185/glmlic.5-698.1.

Researchers working with the “G2LM|LIC - UYOP: Uganda Youth Opportunity Program - COVID-19 Survey” are obligated to acknowledge the data base and its documentation within their publications, including the DOI, by using this reference.