Conflict-Imposed Shutdowns and Infant Mortality: Evidence from IPOB Sit-at-Home Mandates

Weekly sit-at-home orders issued by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) have periodically shut down markets, transport, and schools across Southeast Nigeria since August 2021. While a growing descriptive literature documents these disruptions, credible causal evidence on population health has been missing. I study this question using Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey birth histories from 2014 to 2023 in a difference-in-differences design that compares the five treated South-East states to neighboring South-South states before and after the onset of institutionalized sit-at-home mandates. Event-study estimates show no pre-treatment differential trends. The main result is a precisely estimated null on average: infant mortality does not change meaningfully in the Southeast relative to the South-South after August 2021, and this conclusion is robust across alternative specifications and placebo tests. Sensitivity analyses using broader comparison groups yield modestly larger negative effects, predictably reflecting the concurrent mortality burden of jihadist violence and communal conflict in Nigeria's northern regions rather than any failure of the identification strategy. Beneath the average, however, effects are heterogeneous by household wealth. Infant mortality rises for births in the fourth wealth quintile but falls among the wealthiest households, consistent with differences in the ability to smooth income and maintain access to care during repeated disruptions. The findings provide the first causal estimates for a policy debate that has so far relied on correlation, and they highlight how conflict-adjacent economic shutdowns can have distributional health consequences even when average effects are small.