First and Second Generation Impacts of the Biafran War

Abstract

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Humanitarian Crises and Adolescent Well‐being: Knowledge, Gaps, and Prospects

“…Justino et al (2014) find a substantial human-capital loss among boys exposed to the Timor-Leste secession conflict , but not among girls. Similarly, as mentioned above, Akresh et al (2012aAkresh et al ( , 2017 find the highest negative impact among women exposed to conflict during adolescence. By contrast, León (2012) finds statistically significant effects in Peru if the exposure to conflict takes place in utero, in early childhood, or during the preschool years, but not during the primary and secondary school years.…”

“…Unfortunately, the focus of the literature on the early years of life results in other stages of child development not been sufficiently investigated. Of the 78 studies reviewed for this report, 28 examine the effects of shocks exclusively during the early years, and only 12 explore across age groups, including adolescence (Agüero and Deolalikar, 2012;Akresh et al, 2012aAkresh et al, , 2012bAkresh et al, , 2017Caruso, 2017;Caruso and Miller, 2015;Domingues and Barre, 2013;Gutierrez and Gallegos, 2016;La Mattina and Shemyakina, 2017;León, 2012;Scholte et al, 2015;Shah and Steinberg, 2017). Some of these studies have indeed shown that the legacy of conflict affects children at the early stages of life and also in adolescence, as well as the next generations (Agüero and Deolalikar, 2012;Akresh et al, 2012aAkresh et al, , 2017.…”

“…supply. More recently, Akresh et al (2017) find that the children of women exposed to the Biafran War also exhibit a higher probability of early mortality, stunting, and below normal weight. Mothers exposed in adolescence for the average duration of the war suffered the largest increases in neonatal, infant, and child mortality rates (and those impacts were large: 28%, 18%, and 19% of the mean, respectively).…”

The Long-Term Effect of Humanitarian Emergencies on Adolescents

“…Yet, what we do know suggests that in specific emergency contexts -of war, for example -individuals exposed at an adolescent age are more severely impacted. 8 A relevant study on the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970 found that women who had been exposed to the war were shorter in height, had a higher body mass index (BMI), and were more likely to be overweight (Akresh et al, 2017). These adverse effects were larger for those exposed during adolescence (ages 13 to 16) in comparison to those exposed at an earlier age.…”

“…Adolescents' achievements against the odds in contexts of response and recovery programmes provide some lessons. In Nigeria, for example, the outcomes of a universal primary education programme (UPE) implemented after the end of the civil war illustrated how an intervention following a negative shock (war, in this case) could partially offset its impacts: The UPE programme was found to mitigate the effects of war exposure on education by almost 70 per cent (Akresh et al, 2017). Similar positive results in terms of educational attainment have been found in large-scale education programmes following periods of crisis in Indonesia (Duflo, 2001), Benin (Wantchekon et al, 2015) and Vietnam (Dang, Hoang and Nguyen, 2018).…”