Building Resilience: The Effects of Conflict and Drought Parental Investments and Early Childhood Development 

Abstract:

How does hazard exposure affect young children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills? We link detailed DHS data from Africa and the Middle East to geo-referenced armed conflict and drought data. Exploiting only highly local and short-term variation in armed conflict and drought exposure, we document an overall negative impact of exposure to these two hazards while in utero on child development. Differently, when exposed in early childhood (age 0-4) there is no effect of either hazard on cognitive skills, and the effects on non-cognitive skills diverge. Conflict increases non-cognitive skills while drought decreases them. The positive conflict effect is sizeable: a one standard deviation increase in conflict exposure increases non-cognitive skills by about 0.12 standard deviations or 11 percent. Investigating the mechanisms, we find that the effect is driven by parents who invest more in their children when living close to fatal events. Drought exposure, on the other hand, decreases parental investments. Furthermore, the positive effect of conflict on non-cognitive skills and parents’ investments is entirely driven by more gender equal countries and non-existing in countries with low gender equality. The positive effects also disappear for households from ethnic groups directly associated with the fighting dyad, and turn significantly negative for ethnic minorities engaged in co-ethnic conflict.

Authors:

Sofia Nordenving and Thorsten Rogall