What Drives COVID-19 Management Protocol Compliance in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Towards implementing pro-active management strategies to curtail the spread of Covid-19 in sub- Saharan Africa (SSA), this study identifies the factors that influence compliance of Covid-19 preventive management strategies in SSA. In the absence of national data, we use cross-sectional panel data collated by GeoPoll on twelve SSA countries. The study generates a unique index and employs a cross-sectional pooled logit econometric regression with its associated predicted margins to predict the determinants of such behavioural response to the COVID-19 management strategies. We show evidence of demographic factors, institutional measures, and country-specific characteristics as drivers of the behavioural response to COVID-19 management strategies in SSA. Also, we investigate gender differences across the disaggregated COVID-19 pandemic management protocols and find that with respect to avoiding public transport, hygiene, handwashing and social distance, females behave differently in complying with the protocols from males. However, in relation to avoiding public places and working from home , we do not observe significant differences in the behaviour of females and males. Interestingly, for the unique index that is a composite measure of all the protocols, we did not observe such gender differences. We recommend that policies towards compliance should focus on demographic, institutional, and country-specific factors.Funding Information: There has been no funding received.Conflict of Interests: None to declare.