A new study presented at the 2026 Africa Evidence Summit has found that exposure to armed conflict has significant short- and medium-term consequences for adolescent human capital in Ethiopia, affecting schooling, entry into paid work, mental health and exposure to violence.
Presenting the study, “The Impacts of Conflict on Adolescent Human Capital: Evidence from an Eight-Year Panel in Ethiopia,” Emilien Akotenou and Joan Hamory of the University of Oklahoma explained that the research sought to fill an important gap in the existing evidence on the consequences of armed conflict for adolescents.
The researchers said that while much of the existing literature had examined the short-term effects of conflict on adults and younger children, considerably less was known about how conflict affected adolescents over both the short and medium term.
They emphasized that this was particularly important because adolescence represents a second critical period of physical, emotional and cognitive development after early childhood. They noted that more than 230 million adolescents worldwide live in areas affected by conflict, underscoring the importance of understanding how violence affects their development and future opportunities.
The Study Examines Conflict Effects on More Than 6,700 Adolescents. The researchers explained that their study examined the broad consequences of armed conflict on adolescents’ schooling, transition into the labour market and social and psychological outcomes.
They sought to answer several key questions, including how conflict affected adolescents in the short and medium term and whether the consequences were amplified by household or local conditions.
To address these questions, the researchers linked detailed conflict-event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) database with longitudinal information on Ethiopian adolescents.
They said the analysis covered more than 6,700 adolescents observed between 2017 and 2025, allowing them to examine how exposure to conflict affected young people over an extended period.
The presentation showed that conflict events had occurred across both rural and urban study locations, including South Gondar, Debre Tabor, Hari Rasu in Afar, Dire Dawa, East Hararghe and Adami Tulu.
The researchers presented trends in conflict events between 2016 and 2025 and explained that the pattern of violence had evolved alongside major political developments in Ethiopia.
The period covered by the data included anti-government protests and states of emergency, political transition and civil war.
They emphasized that the geographical distribution and intensity of conflict varied substantially across study areas, providing an opportunity to examine how different levels of exposure affected adolescents.
The study relied on data from the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) Ethiopia Panel, a longitudinal research programme following adolescents across six low-income settings, including Ethiopia.
The researchers explained that the Ethiopian component contained five survey rounds conducted between 2017 and 2025.
At baseline, the study followed adolescents who were approximately 10–12 and 15–17 years old. The surveys were conducted approximately one and a half to two years apart and collected comprehensive information on adolescents’ well-being.
The data covered areas including:
School enrollment and education;
Paid employment;
Mental health;
Exposure to violence;
Social relationships and other dimensions of adolescent well-being.
The researchers emphasized that their analysis focused on randomly sampled adolescents, rather than adolescents selected specifically because of particular vulnerabilities.
The presentation showed that the GAGE Ethiopia Panel had generated a substantial number of observations across six study areas.
Across the five rounds, the dataset contained 24,930 completed surveys among randomly sampled adolescents.
The study-area totals were reported as follows:
Debre Tabor: 3,304 observations;
East Hararghe: 8,943;
South Gondar: 7,930;
Adami Tulu: 1,241;
Dire Dawa: 2,143; and
Afar: 1,341.
The researchers noted that there had been no data collection in Rounds 3 and 4 for some sites under the original research design.
The researchers also addressed the possibility that conflict could affect whether adolescents remained in the survey, potentially creating attrition bias.
They explained that a two-stage tracking design had been introduced in Round 3 and continued through Rounds 4 and 5 to reduce potential bias arising from survey attrition.
Survey weights were also adjusted to preserve the representativeness of the sample.
The researchers conducted tests for selective attrition by comparing adolescents exposed to different levels of conflict-related deaths.
They reported that the results did not generally show large systematic differences in attrition across conflict exposure groups, although some statistically significant relationships appeared in later rounds.They said these findings would be considered further through additional robustness analysis.
A key feature of the study was the way in which the researchers linked conflict events to individual households.
A grid measuring approximately 0.1 degrees by 0.1 degrees, equivalent to roughly 11 kilometres, was placed over Ethiopia. Each GAGE household and each conflict event recorded in ACLED was assigned to a grid cell.
The researchers counted the number of conflict-related fatalities occurring in the relevant grid cell during the 12 months preceding each survey round.
They then classified adolescents according to the intensity of their first exposure to conflict.
A low-intensity exposure was defined as between one and five conflict-related deaths, while a high-intensity exposure was defined as more than five deaths.
This approach allowed the researchers to distinguish between adolescents exposed to relatively low levels of conflict and those living in areas experiencing more severe conflict.
The researchers reported that approximately one in five adolescents in the study had been exposed to conflict.
Among those exposed, most experienced high-intensity conflict exposure, defined as more than five conflict-related deaths in the relevant location and period.
The study also highlighted major changes in adolescents’ socioeconomic trajectories over the survey period.
School enrollment was reported to fall from approximately 85% to 40%, while participation in paid work tripled by Round 5.
The researchers cautioned that these overall trends reflected broader changes as adolescents aged, but the empirical analysis was designed to isolate the additional effects associated with conflict exposure.
To estimate the effects of conflict, the researchers exploited variation in the timing and intensity of conflict exposure within kebeles.
They used an event-study framework that allowed them to compare adolescent outcomes before and after their first exposure to conflict while accounting for differences across locations and survey rounds.
The researchers included kebele fixed effects, survey-round fixed effects and study-area-by-round fixed effects.
These controls were intended to account for permanent differences between communities, common changes over time and area-specific developments occurring during particular survey rounds.
The researchers also controlled for baseline characteristics, including:
Household assets;
Literacy;
Sex; and
Adolescent cohort.
The central parameter of interest captured the cumulative effect of conflict exposure over time.
The researchers explained that the omitted period was the survey round immediately preceding the first conflict exposure, allowing subsequent outcomes to be interpreted relative to the pre-exposure period.
The results showed that schooling was disrupted immediately following conflict exposure.
For adolescents exposed to low-intensity conflict, school enrollment initially declined but subsequently showed evidence of recovery.
However, among adolescents exposed to high-intensity conflict, the reduction in school enrollment persisted over time.
The researchers therefore concluded that the intensity of conflict was an important determinant of the duration of its effects on educational participation.
They emphasized that while adolescents in relatively lower-intensity conflict settings appeared capable of recovering some of their educational engagement, those exposed to more severe conflict experienced more persistent disruption.
The study also found important effects on adolescents’ participation in paid employment.
Among adolescents exposed to low-intensity conflict, paid work initially increased but the effect appeared to be temporary.
In high-intensity conflict settings, however, the increase in paid work was more persistent.
The researchers suggested that conflict could therefore accelerate adolescents’ entry into economic activity, potentially at the expense of schooling.
This finding was particularly important in the context of adolescent human capital because early entry into paid work may represent both an immediate household coping mechanism and a longer-term shift away from education.
The researchers also reported significant consequences for adolescent mental health.
Using a standardized PHQ-9 depression score, they found that mental health worsened following exposure to conflict.
The deterioration was observed among adolescents exposed to both low- and high-intensity conflict and appeared to become more pronounced over time.
The researchers therefore emphasized that the consequences of conflict extended beyond education and labour-market outcomes to adolescents’ psychological well-being.
They noted that the worsening of mental health over time suggested that the effects of conflict could accumulate rather than disappear immediately after violence subsided.
The researchers also examined adolescents’ exposure to violence in the home and among peers.
For violence at home, the results differed according to conflict intensity.
Among adolescents exposed to low-intensity conflict, experiences or witnessing of violence at home appeared to decline.
In contrast, adolescents living in high-intensity conflict areas experienced an increase in home violence.
The researchers also examined peer violence victimization and found evidence of changes following conflict exposure, with patterns varying according to the intensity and timing of exposure.
These findings suggested that conflict could affect adolescents’ social environments in complex ways, influencing not only direct exposure to armed violence but also violence within households and peer networks.
Drawing together the findings, the researchers emphasized that conflict intensity played a critical role in determining the severity and persistence of impacts on adolescent human capital.
They explained that low-intensity conflict could produce temporary disruptions, particularly in schooling and paid work, with some evidence of recovery.
High-intensity conflict, by contrast, was associated with more persistent effects, including continued reductions in schooling, sustained increases in paid work and worsening mental health.
The findings therefore suggested that the consequences of conflict should not be understood simply as a binary distinction between exposure and non-exposure. Instead, the intensity and duration of exposure mattered substantially.
The researchers argued that these findings had important implications for Ethiopia's efforts to protect and develop its young population.
They explained that disruptions to schooling could have long-term consequences because adolescence is an important period for accumulating education and skills before entering adulthood.
If conflict pushed adolescents out of school and into paid work prematurely, the resulting loss of human capital could persist well beyond the immediate conflict period.
Similarly, deteriorating mental health could affect educational achievement, labour-market participation and social relationships over the longer term.
The researchers therefore emphasized that policies addressing conflict should consider adolescents not only as victims of immediate violence but also as individuals whose future human capital formation can be substantially altered by conflict exposure.
In summarizing the research, Akotenou and Hamory reported that the study provided evidence that conflict disrupts adolescent human capital and that the effects become stronger with greater conflict intensity.
First, schooling declined immediately following conflict exposure. Among adolescents exposed to lower-intensity conflict, schooling showed some recovery, whereas the effects persisted among those exposed to high-intensity conflict.
Second, participation in paid work increased following conflict exposure. The increase was relatively temporary in low-intensity settings but more persistent in high-intensity areas.
Third, adolescents’ mental health worsened following conflict exposure, with negative effects increasing over time across both intensity groups.
Fourth, conflict altered adolescents’ exposure to violence within their homes and among their peers, with the direction and magnitude of the effects depending on the intensity of conflict.
The researchers outlined several priorities for future analysis. They said they would undertake additional analysis of conflict-driven attrition, including the use of the Lee (2009) bounds approach to determine how robust the findings were to potential non-random loss of respondents.
They also planned to test the robustness of the results using alternative definitions of conflict exposure, including different geographical radii and time horizons.
Finally, they said future work would investigate the potential role of social protection programmes in mitigating the effects of conflict on adolescents.
In particular, they identified Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) and the Act With Her programme as potential mechanisms through which vulnerable adolescents and households could be supported.
The study presented at the Africa Evidence Summit provided longitudinal evidence that armed conflict can have far-reaching consequences for adolescents’ education, economic participation, mental health and social well-being.
By linking detailed conflict-event data with an eight-year panel of adolescents across rural and urban Ethiopia, the researchers demonstrated that the effects of conflict extended beyond immediate physical insecurity.
They concluded that conflict exposure could interrupt the accumulation of human capital during adolescence, with the most severe and persistent effects occurring in areas experiencing high-intensity conflict.
The researchers ultimately emphasized the need for conflict-response and recovery policies to place adolescents at the centre of interventions, combining measures to protect schooling, address early economic pressures, support mental health and reduce exposure to violence.
They argued that protecting adolescents during periods of conflict was not only essential for their immediate well-being but also critical for safeguarding Ethiopia’s long-term human capital and development prospects.
