1. Gender-differentiated impacts of violent conflict
An Overview
Mayra Buvinic, Director PREMGE
Monica Das Gupta, DECRG
Ursula Casabonne, PREMGE
The World Bank

2. PREMGE – DECRG research program
Earlier work on gender, poverty and demography:
The impact of demographic conditions on poverty
How gender inequalities exacerbate this impact
Current work is on the gender-disaggregated impact of violent conflict

3. Conflicts can be self-renewing, livelihood support can help break the cycle
High proportion of conflicts today are internal conflicts in poor developing countries
Collier and others find:
Economically vulnerable nations more likely to experience conflict
Conflicts destroy physical and human capital, disrupt economies, “development in reverse”
“Conflict trap”: conflicts intensify economic vulnerability, so chances of renewed conflict much higher in first 5 years after conflict.

4. Large gender differentials in the impact of conflict
Males are subject to far higher excess mortality, injuries, and disability
especially young adult males, so labor force heavily impacted
Females also highly impacted:
Sexual violence
Left to cope with raising children and caring for the old, often in the face of:
Breakdown of economy, administration, service delivery
Breakdown of civil and social infrastructure
Rise in sick, maimed, and traumatized family members
Possible loss of household assets
Possible displacement from home

5. Adult men more likely to be killed in conflict
Germany, 1950
Cambodia, 1980
Source: Authors’ analysis based on data from United Nations Population Division (2006).

6. Boys’ lifetime prospects can be affected by child soldiering
Educational attainment lost and labor market effects of child soldiers is substantial: Abducted youth attain 0.78 fewer years of education than non-abducted youth, which implies an 11% reduction in education attainment.
This paper presents new evidence on the causal impact of military participation using an original dataset collected by the author in northern Uganda. The large-scale, indiscriminate and forcible abduction of youth by Ugandan rebels provide arguably exogenous variation in exposure to conflict. Results suggest that the most prevalent effect of abduction is on human capital acquisition: abductees lose nearly a year of schooling on average. Combined with a greater incidence of injuries, this schooling loss leads to nearly a third lower earnings.
Source Blattman, C. & Annan, J. (2007), ‘The consequences of child soldiering’. Households in Conflict Network Working Paper, 22

7. Women have to cope under very challenging conditions
Males are subject to far higher excess mortality, injuries, and disability
especially young adult males, so labor force heavily impacted
Females also highly impacted:
Sexual violence
Left to cope with raising children and caring for the old, often in the face of:
Breakdown of economy, administration, service delivery
Breakdown of civil and social infrastructure
Rise in sick, maimed, and traumatized family members
Possible loss of household assets
Possible displacement from home

8. PREMGE / DECRG work on the gender-differentiated impact of conflict
To add rigorous studies of the gender- disaggregated impact of violent conflict on:
human capital
marriage and fertility
labor force participation and economic empowerment
There is little existing work in this area, and it is also often not gender-disaggregated

9. Where surveys available, methodological issues:
There are few rigorous studies on the micro-level impacts of violent conflict due to data constraints
Large-scale, high quality household surveys often not available for countries affected by violent conflict.
Where surveys available, methodological issues:
often difficult to attribute causality
selective nature of respondents: non-random attrition due to mortality, migration or displacement
But recent work is finding innovative ways to resolve some of these issues

10. Emerging Evidence

11. Effects on human capital
Affects child health
higher mortality
poorer growth
Child schooling suffers

12. Child mortality can rise
Impact of the Genocide on Child Mortality in Rwanda
Source: Humberto, Lopez and Quentin Wodon, The Economic Impact of Armed Conflict in Rwanda, Journal of African Economies 14 (4):

13. Surviving children can have poorer growth outcomes
The effect is between to
Much of the research doesn't observe a gender or wealth effect, which leads to speculate that this is due to the sudden and unexpected nature of civil war. Parents were unable to protect any of their children.
Bundervoet et al (2009) speculate of two channels through which conflict may affect child health: violence-induced displacement and the theft and burning of crops. Both mechanisms negatively affect nutrition and displacement also makes exposed children more vulnerable to water and vector-borne diseases. A child exposed to these events would be worse-off compared to a child who did not experience these shocks and we would expect the adverse impact to be larger the longer the child is exposed to it.
Notes:
Nutritional outcomes for children can be measured by several anthropometric indicators. The three most common used are acute malnutrition, chronic malnutrition and general malnutrition (WHO, 1995). Acute malnutrition, or weight-for-height, is an indicator of wasting caused by severe, recent onset of adversities such as rapid reductions in food availability or interference with food intake due to infections. Thereafter, reflects current malnutrition status (e.g. at the time of the survey) relative to height. Chronic malnutrition, or height-for –age, is an indicator of stunting attributed to long-term malnutrition resulting from low growth due to protein deficiency, low-food intake for longer periods, concurrent illnesses, or detrimental health of the mother during pregnancy. It reflects the accumulated detrimental effect over a period of time. Underweight, or weight-for-age, is an indicator of general malnutrition; it reflects the body mass relative to age. From the above mentioned indicators, chronic malnutrition is important because children that become stunted during their early months/years of life are likely to remain, in future periods, short in height for their age (Martorell and Habicht, 1986). While wasting is an indicator of short-term health, and general under nutrition can reflect both, short and long term nutrition status, they might be overcome at later stages in life by the gain of weight. The literature on nutrition indicates that these measures do not necessarily move together (Victoria 1991). So, children that develop chronic malnutrition, or stunting, might or might not have acute malnutrition, or wasting31.
Sources: Guerrero-Serdán, Gabriela “The Effects of the War in Iraq on Nutrition and Health: An Analysis Using Anthropometric Outcomes of Children” HiCN Working Paper 55; Bundervoet, Tom, Philip Verwimp, and Richard Akresh, “Health and Civil War in Rural in Burundi,” Journal of Human Resources 44(2): 536–563.; Akresh, Richard, Philip Verwimp, and Tom Bundervoet, “Civil War, Crop Failure and Child Stunting in Rwanda,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No

14. Children’s schooling can suffer (sometimes more for girls)
Chambarwala et al (2008) examine the impact of the worst period of the Guatemalan civil war ( ) on children’s human capital accumulation. The empirical identication strategy exploits variation in the war's intensity across departments and which cohorts were school age during the war. The study calculates the average years of schooling for individuals exposed to the worst period of the civil war ( ) when they were school age (those born between 1961 and 1977) and individuals who had completed school age by 1979 (those born between 1950 and 1960).
Calculating the difference-in-differences estimator indicates a decline of 0.36 years of schooling for the exposed cohort in high war intensity departments and the
result is significant at the 1 percent level. Given an average of 3.92 years of schooling in Guatemala (see Table 1 column 4), the magnitude of the eect is large and represents a decline of 9 percent.
Panels B and C report these figures for males and females and show a small difference-in-dffierences estimate for males (-0.13) but a large one for females
(-0.55).
Parents may also withdraw their daughters from school in order to protect them from being sexually assaulted, raped, and harassed.
In Tajikistan, Shemyakina (2006) reports a drop in female enrolment rates following the onset of the civil war in Tajikistan, and throughout
the conflict. At the end of the war, in 1999, school enrolments were lower for girls aged living in high conflict intensity areas. Table 4 in the paper indicate that the household damage dwelling is strongly and negatively associated with the enrollment of girls. Girls are 11 to 12 percent (significant at 1% level) less likely to be enrolled if their household reported damage to the dwelling.
Lower attendance may reflect higher risk or fear of being accosted or harassed by the soldiers or militants on their way to school
Akresh & de Walque (2008) nd a strong negative impact of the Rwandan genocide on schooling, with children exposed to the civil war experiencing an 18.3 percent
decline in their average years of education. The authors nd a stronger negative eect for males and for the non-poor. [ ask nistha table 4 and 5]
Sources: Chamarbagwala, Rubiana, and Hilcías E. Morán “The Human Capital Consequences of Civil War: Evidence from Guatemala” HiCN Working Paper 59; Shemyakina, Olga, “The effect of armed conflict on accumulation of schooling: results from Tajikistan”. Households in Conflict Network Working Paper 12

15. Effects on marriage and fertility
Disruptions of conflict can lead to:
Postponement of marriage
Postponed childbearing even if married
Rebound in fertility after the conflict
Shortage of men due to their higher mortality in conflict can lead to:
High rates of non-marriage of women
Increase in short-term consensual unions as male bargaining power higher
Out-migration of single women to places with better opportunities

16. Effects on household economy
Household economy disrupted:
Loss of assets (destruction, looting, distress sale)
Loss of working age men, rise in maimed
Displacement from home
Breakdowns in administration, services, infrastructure
Shift to subsistence farming (in agrarian settings)
Found to help maintain child nutrition indicators despite falling income
Women take on role of breadwinner. Some options:
Home-based work (subsistence farming, crafts with established market such as carpet-weaving in Afghanistan)
New entrepreneurship providing services locally (e.g. tailoring)
Training in new skills geared to meet existing demand / markets
Attempts to build entrepreneurship in unestablished channels less likely to succeed under all the additional constraints of post-conflict life