Shocking social safety: Evidence from violence and drought in North-east Nigeria

Polycrises created by violent conflict and climate change are ubiquitous. Yet, the impacts of conflict and climatic shocks on human behavior and welfare have largely been studied in isolation. This paper studies the joint impact of conflict and climatic shocks on households’ social safety nets in fragile settings. Drawing on unique panel survey data from 1,293 households in North-east Nigeria, we document that experiencing a violence shock increases the strength of households’ social safety nets (SSN) when they do not experience a simultaneous drought shock. Yet, experiencing a violence shock decreases SSN strength when they experience a drought shock in addition. This perilous interaction between violence and drought shocks is concentrated in poorer local environments. When the local level of economic resources is high, in relative terms, the positive impact of a violence shock on SSN is dominant. However, when the level of economic resources is low, the influence of droughts shocks rises substantially and experiencing both a drought and a violence shock diminishes social safety drastically. The effect is driven primarily by the exhaustion of informal networks such as kinship- and neighbor-based transfers. Our findings emphasize the need for concerted social protection programs that not only account for the compounding vulnerability from poverty, conflict and climatic change but also recognize the fragility of informal support systems that form the backbone of resilience in fragile settings.