Armed Conflict and Schooling in Rwanda: Digging Deeper

2008

Armed Conflict and Schooling: Evidence from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide * To examine the impact of Rwanda's 1994 genocide on children's schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses prewar data to control for an age group's baseline schooling and exploits variation across provinces in the intensity of killings and which children's cohorts were school-aged when exposed to the war. The findings show a strong negative impact of the genocide on schooling, with exposed children completing one-half year less education representing an 18.3 percent decline. The effect is robust to including control variables, alternative sources for genocide intensity, and an instrumental variables strategy.

This paper estimates the effect of low-intensity conflict on primary schooling outcomes in Uganda. We exploit variation in instability across communities and districts with a difference-indifference methodology and focus on age groups enrolled in school during the low-level conflict. We find that low-intensity conflict was important: years of schooling rose, indicating a 0.2 rise in the years of education. However, students exposed to low-level conflict became less likely to complete each grade than before. The results are stronger for children from families with incomes below the mean and robust to including measures of educational resources. An emerging applied micro-econometric literature is in general agreement on the negative impacts of full-scale conflict on human capital outcomes: mainly primary education and child nutrition (see e.g., Shemyakina 2006; Alderman, Hoddinott, and Kinsey 2006; Bundervoet Akresh and Verwimp 2008; Blattman and Annan, 2010; León 2010; Akresh and de Walque forthcoming). Although there is a rising empirical body of research on the effects of full-scale civil war on the human capital of both victims and perpetrators 1 , that work has primarily ignored the impacts of low-intensity conflict. 2 This is despite the detail that lower-intensity conflicts account for as much as 82% of the conflicts in question and are particularly important in Sub-Saharan Africa. Political instability and violence has affected a third of the continent in the mid-1990s alone (see Blattman, forthcoming). Low-intensity conflicts, which have become increasingly common particularly in Africa, may produce different outcomes than full-scale war or genocide. What are the effects of low-intensity conflict on human capital development? This paper explores this empirical question by measuring educational outcomes using nationally representative data from Uganda over a period 1999-2005 characterized by low-1 Blattman and Annan (2010) analyzes the results of rebel recruitment on human capital outcomes. 2 Kalvas (2006) analyzes why rival factions often favor selective violence in areas where they do not fully dominate.

Review of Income and Wealth, 2013

Civil war and genocide in the 1990-2000 period in Rwanda -a small, landlocked, densely populated country in Central Africa -have had differential economic impacts on the country's provinces. The reasons for this are the death toll of the genocide, the location of battles, the waves of migration and the local resurgence of war. As a result, the labour/land and labour/capital ratios at the provincial level changed considerably during that period. Using two cross-sections, we find empirical evidence for convergence between provinces following the conflict shocks: previously richer provinces in the east and in the north of the country experienced lower, even negative, economic growth compared to the poorer western and southern provinces. This has in turn affected significantly the dynamics of household poverty in Rwanda in the same period. Using a small but unique panel of households surveyed before and after the conflict period, we find that households whose house was destroyed or who lost land ran a higher risk of falling into poverty. This was particularly the case for households who were land-rich before the genocide. We do not find this for the loss of household labour. In the latter case the effect depends on the violent or non-violent character of the loss. JEL codes: C33, I32, O55

Prospects, 2011

This article considers the relationship between education, conflict, and peacebuilding in Rwanda. First, it examines the role that education played in the lead-up to the 1994 genocide, discussing whether and how the low levels of educational attainment, inequalities of access, curricular content, and teaching methods contributed to the conditions for violence. It then looks at approaches to rebuilding the education sector since 1994. Despite significant progress, for example in widening access and achieving gender parity at primary level, three significant challenges remain. First, educational opportunity continues to be unequal in the post-primary sector, with disparities of access between rich and poor, a severe lack of alternative and non-formal educational opportunities, and some ethnic dimensions to the disparities. Second, tensions remain over history teaching due to government attempts to impose a single “official” narrative of Rwanda’s history. Finally, teaching methods remain largely teacher-centred, with little open debate and teaching of critical thinking skills. The article cautions that, despite progress, some dimensions of Rwanda’s current education policy and practice may continue to exacerbate tensions. It concludes by outlining some future priorities and urges the Rwandan government and its international development partners to more rigorously assess the potential impact of education policies on fragile social relations, and to embrace opportunities for education to play a more central role in peacebuilding in Rwanda.

Comparative Education

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of cross-national data on armed conflict, state fragility, and enrolment in primary and secondary schooling. The study is motivated by questions raised in the 2012 Human Security Report, which challenges the widely held assumption that conflict is necessarily detrimental to educational outcomes. We use multilevel modelling techniques to determine how conflict and fragility relate to changes in enrolment. Our findings suggest that growth in enrolment is significantly lower in conflict-affected countries but that the effect is dependent upon countries' overall enrolment level. However, when we control for fragility, the effect of conflict is not significant, which is consistent with the Human Security Report's suggestion that fragility is an underlying cause of both conflict and poor educational outcomes. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings and challenges for future research on fragility and education.

2016

We use the variation in the timing of conflict between countries using a difference-indifferences matching strategy to identify the impacts of armed conflict on years of schooling and educational inequality. We draw upon data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and the Ethnic Power Relations databases, which enable us to distinguish between ethnic and nonethnic conflicts. Further, we are able to identify the effect of conflict onset as well as the incidence of conflict in years following onset. Our results provide evidence that the introduction of any conflict worsens educational attainment and exacerbates pre-existing inequalities thereof. This paper also shows that conflict effects are more pronounced when ethnic in nature and that attainment and inequality outcomes worsen as conflicts persist over time. Our results are robust to different regression specifications and propensity score matching algorithms. JEL Classification: F51, I24, I25

2014

This book questions the conventional wisdom that education builds peace by exploring the ways in which ordinary schooling can contribute to intergroup conflict. Based on fieldwork and comparative historical analysis of Rwanda, it argues that from the colonial period to the genocide, schooling was a key instrument of the state in contributing to the construction, awareness, collectivization, and inequality of ethnic groups in Rwanda – all factors that underlay conflict. The book further argues that today's post-genocide schools are dangerously replicating past trends. This book is the first to offer an in-depth study of education in Rwanda and to analyze its role in the genesis of conflict. The book demonstrates that to build peace, we cannot simply prescribe more education, but must understand who has access to schools, how schools are set up, and what and how they teach. AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AUGUST 2015.

South Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war since 2013, with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced. The economy has nearly collapsed, severely reducing the nation’s output and causing inflation to soar. While prior research on the immediate humanitarian consequences has focused on forced displacement and food insecurity, little knowledge exists about the long-term impact of war on human capital accumulation in this context. This analysis exploits spatial variation in exposure to violence to estimate the causal impact of the recent South Sudanese civil war on primary school enrollment as a measure of human capital accumulation. Results based on the difference-in-differences (DD) methodology indicate a statistically significant relationship between enrollment and the war. Generally, the study shows that schools located in the war zones lost on average 85 children per year, which represents 18.5 percent of total enrollment. The diminishing trends in girls’ enrollment are unrelated to the war. This is unsurprising, as social barriers, including gendered domestic roles, early marriage, and out of wedlock pregnancies have long impeded female educational opportunities in South Sudan. These effects are robust to a number of specifications, including holding constant school-level fixed-effects and adjusting for the standard errors. Implications for policy, including investing in girls’ education, labor market and educational policies, and compulsory primary education for all children regardless of gender, both locally and internationally, are discussed.

The World Bank Economic Review, 2013

This paper analyzes the impact of the wave of violence that occurred in Timor Leste in 1999 on education outcomes. We examine the short-term impact of the violence on school attendance in 2001 and its longer-term impact on primary school completion of the same cohorts of children observed again in 2007. We compare the educational impact of the 1999 violence with the impact of other periods of high-intensity violence during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation. The short-term effects of the conflict are mixed. In the longer term, we find evidence of a substantial loss of human capital among boys in Timor Leste who were exposed to peaks of violence during the 25-year long conflict. The evidence suggests that this result may be due to household trade offs between education and economic welfare. JEL Codes: I20, J13, O12, O15 The developmental consequences of violence and conflict are far reaching, affecting millions of men, women, and children (World Bank 2011). The objective of this paper is to examine one important channel linking violent conflict and development outcomes: the education of children living in contexts of conflict and violence. The paper focuses on the case of Timor Leste, particularly the last wave of violence in 1999 during the withdrawal of Indonesian troops from the territory. We analyze the short-term impact of the 1999 violence on primary school attendance in 2001 and its longer-term impact on primary school completion in 2007. In addition, we separately examine the impact of early periods of high-intensity violence (HVI) during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation and the effects of the entire conflict on primary school completion in 2007 to compare the average impact of the overall conflict period with the educational impact of singular peaks of violence. This is a

2018

South Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war since 2013, with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced. The economy has nearly collapsed, severely reducing the nation’s output and causing inflation to soar. While prior research on the immediate humanitarian consequences has focused on forced displacement and food insecurity, little knowledge exists about the long-term impact of war on human capital accumulation in this context. This analysis exploits spatial variation in exposure to violence to estimate the causal impact of the recent South Sudanese civil war on primary school enrollment as a measure of human capital accumulation. Results based on the difference-in-differences (DD) methodology indicate a statistically significant relationship between enrollment and the war. Generally, the study shows that schools located in the war zones lost on average 85 children per year, which represents 18.5 percent of total enrollment. The diminishing trends in girls’ enrollment are unrelated to the war. This is unsurprising, as social barriers, including gendered domestic roles, early marriage, and out of wedlock pregnancies have long impeded female educational opportunities in South Sudan. These effects are robust to a number of specifications, including holding constant school-level fixed-effects and adjusting for the standard errors. Implications for policy, including investing in girls’ education, labor market and educational policies, and compulsory primary education for all children regardless of gender, both locally and internationally, are discussed.