In this thesis, we use microeconomic household survey data to study the short- and long-term consequences of violent conflict on children’s health and educational outcomes. This thesis also uses a unique set of baseline and endline impact evaluation data to empirically assess whether a popular targeted social protection intervention, namely cash transfers, rolled out in a conflict-prone and fragile setting could spur agricultural productive investments and increased food security. The first two papers of this thesis empirically assess the long-term impacts of violent conflict on the second generation of children under five years of age born more than a decade after the end of violent hostility in Angola and Burundi. The main findings emerging from the first two papers of this thesis are in line with the microeconomic literature on the long-term effects of early childhood exposure to shocks on health and educational outcomes. We found that children born to mothers who were exposed to violent conflict in early childhood and during primary school age tend to have poorer health anthropometrics and present socio-emotional delay compared to their peers.
The third paper of this thesis studies how the surge in terrorist attacks perpetrated by the Islamic group BOKO-HARAM in Far-North Cameroon has impacted the health outcomes of children who were directly exposed. The latter helps lay the groundwork for the final and concluding paper of this thesis, investigating whether an unconditional cash transfer intervention with a signed moral contract rolled out during the period when there was a surge of BOKO-HARAM terrorist attacks in Far-North Cameroon improved agricultural productive investments, nutrition and food security of recipient households. We find that children under five years of age who were born or alive during the surge of the BOKO HARAM terrorist attacks in Far-North Cameroon have poorer health outcomes than their peers born after that period. Our findings also suggest that cash transfers rolled out in an active conflict-prone environment trigger productive agricultural and livestock investments, which then mediate positive effects on nutrition and food security.
With the rise of different forms of political crises, mainly conflict-induced forced displacement and pandemics, the main findings of this thesis not only point out to the critical age of conflict exposure likely to spark negative consequences on the next generation of children born in the aftermath of violent attacks; but also confirm the effectiveness of social protection programs, namely cash transfers, to protect households against such shocks in fragile and conflict-prone environments.
About the author
Soazic Elise Wang Sonne holds a double engineering degree in Statistics, Econometrics and Applied Economics from The Sub-regional Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics of Central Africa in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Elise is also a holder of a MSc in Program Evaluation from the University of Rennes 1 (France) funded by the UK Chevening Cameroon Woman excellence scholarship.
She worked for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; the Economic Department of the French Embassy and the National Institute of Statistics of Cameroon. Her research interest encompasses technology adoption, children's health, gender, conflict, applied econometrics, impact evaluation and transparency in social sciences. Elise is also a holder of numerous excellence academic prizes, fellowships and scholarships such as the The Cameroon head of the state excellence scholarship for outstanding graduate students and the United Nations young African Scholar fellowship program.
