Armed conflict and schooling: evidence from the 1994 Rwandan genocide

Open Access

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.