Armed Conflict and Schooling: Evidence from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

Abstract:     
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 pre-war 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.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 38

Keywords: civil war, human capital investment, education, genocide, Africa

JEL Classification: I20, J13, O12, O15

working papers series