Impact des conflits armés sur la santé des enfants en République centrafricaine

For several decades, the Central African Republic (CAR) has been the scene of a succession of coups that have been accompanied by armed conflicts in many prefectures of the country. Children often suffer high rates of acute malnutrition during these armed conflicts. This study aims to analyze the impact of the 2003–2008 and 2012–2014 armed conflicts on child health using data from the 2010 and 2018 Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys for the Central African Republic. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting both temporal and spatial variation across birth and prefectures cohorts to measure child exposure to the conflicts. From the difference-in-difference estimation, we found that height-for-age Z-scores are 0.638 and 0.538 standard deviations lower for children born during the 2003–2008 and 2012–1014 armed conflicts respectively; and weight-for-age Z-scores are 0.212 and 0.353 standard deviations lower for children born during the 2003–2008 and 2012–2014 armed conflicts respectively. We also examined the impact of the total duration of exposure to conflicts, and we found that an additional month of exposure to the 2003–2008 armed conflict significantly reduced height-for-age Z-scores and weight-for-age Z-scores, respectively, by 0.00561 and 0.00215 standard deviations on average. Moreover, we performed robustness analyzes by taking into account migrations, conflict intensity levels across prefectures, and level of household wealth, and the results lead to conclusions similar to those found previously. Codes JEL: I15, C52, D74, I18.