Conflict in Yemen and child malnutrition -

Abstract

The paper tries to understand how the conflict in Yemen up to 2013 contributed to the deterioration of the situation in the country, in particular the malnutrition status for children less than five years old. It measures the Yemeni armed conflict’s impact on children’s nutritional status from birth to 59 months of age. The impact of conflict on one specific type of malnutrition – stunting or chronic malnutrition – is measured by calculating height-for-age z-scores (HAZ). Two surveys are used in order to measure the anthropometric indicators for children less than five years old: the Household Budget Survey (HBS) conducted by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Yemen in 2006 and the most recent wave of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for Yemen 2013. The difference-in-differences technique is applied as an econometric methodology. It compares children’s HAZ scores before (2006) and during the conflict (2013) between two types of governorates: a group of governorates, the control group, which do not experience conflict during the whole period, and another group of governorates, the treatment group, which does experience severe conflict at a certain point between 2009 and 2013. The empirical findings show that the malnutrition status of children has deteriorated after the start of the armed conflict in Yemen compared to 2006. Conflict has had negative but statistically insignificant impacts on the young cohort of children. Those between 0 and 33 months of age experiencing conflict while in utero are more stunted by 2percent and have lower height-for-age z-scores by 0.06-0.09 standard deviations than young cohort children in control governorates. These results measured by the difference-in-differences estimator are the additional impact of conflict on the malnutrition status of children less than 59 months of age without evaluating any positive or negative spillover effects.