Table of Contents
- Background
- Methodology
- Findings
- Further detailed findings were that:
Background
After the referendum of Sudan and South Sudan that took place in 2011, Sudan experienced tremendous changes and shifting in its economy, they lost a major share of its Oil Fields. With time prices started to increase that lead to inflation and the devaluation of our Sudanese currency to the Dollar. Since then Sudan has been suffering with these prices instability that kept affecting citizen’s socioeconomic statuses.
This research was conducted on February 2018 in Khartoum, Sudan. It’s a research on how consumers are coping with the latest price increases in Sudan due to Inflation. This report is based on a panel of 30 Sudanese Female Heads of Households called “Sudanese Kitchens” in Khartoum. Those households cover Female Heads of Households belonging to AB, C1, C2 and D Socio-economic Classes. The findings show that consumers are trying different strategies to cope with inflation, switching to cheaper brands, products, even categories, or stopping using the category altogether. The Objective of this research is to find opportunities for offering to add value and offer solutions to the affordability and value for money equation.
Methodology
This report is a qualitative research and was conducted by interacting with ladies on a daily basis to capture the pulse of what’s going on in Sudanese kitchens mainly. We used this panel to ask them about the current socioeconomic conditions in Sudan and how are they coping with the sudden increase in products prices, questions are sent to them during the week on WhatsApp group to spark up a conversation and at the end of the month we go through the group and see what they have been saying to start analyzing and to document what have been said.
Findings
The findings were that, all the ladies mentioned that the living conditions has become very hard because of the prices increase in all commodities for all basic necessities in regards to food, drinks and basic products. This price increase affected their consumption in the following way: Decreased consumption of certain products, Replaced consumed products with other products, Stopped consumption of certain products or Started making their own products at home. Their eating habits has changed, instead of having three meals a day with numerous varieties now they only have two meals with limited and few varieties of dishes. As for the children this has affected their school lunch meal as they started to use less cheaper products, they stopped using products like triangle cheese, sausages, hotdogs and tuna for the children’s sandwiches as well no desserts or juice is added with the meal. This also affected their social gathering’s it has become rare to have ones because now it’s expensive to have people over and prepare for them lunch or dinner meals.
Further detailed findings were that:
- They use less bread, fresh milk, powdered milk and tomato paste
- Decrease/stopped consumption of ready-made sandwiches (fast food) and pastries (sweet & salty)
- They completely stopped using these products; processed meat - tuna - sardine - mozzarella cheese- Jam - Nutella and chocolate - Cereal – Olives- mayonnaise- fruits yoghurt- butter –ghee
- Sausages, pasta, chicken and fish are considered a luxury and are only served when there are guests present.
Nevertheless, this report gave a tremendous insight on how the current situation in Sudan has affected the people and how some people’s living conditions are shifting for the worse due to the country’s economic instability.
