Armed Conflicts, Children’s Education and Mortality: New Evidence from Ivory Coast

Among the sub-Saharan African countries, Ivory Coast has suffered more than 10 years of political instability and absence of peace. Using nationally representative household surveys, this study exploits temporal and geographical variations of the 1999–2011 Ivorian political instability to identify its causal effect on children’s schooling and child mortality. The results showed that individuals who lived in conflict areas and who reached the official age to be enrolled in school within the period of the instability had a 10 % lower probability of being enrolled in school. Students who spent their school years during the conflict and who lived in an affected area experienced a lag in schooling attainment of more than a year. Older students or those who were likely to be in high school during the conflict underwent a loss in schooling attainment of nearly 2 years. In addition, results showed that the Ivorian armed conflict increased the mortality of children under age five by at least 3 %. My results also suggest that the deterioration of living conditions and the limitation of health service use during the conflict contributed to the explaination of these adverse effects. Placebo tests suggested that the results were not driven by preexisting differences across conflict and non-conflict areas.