The Long-term Effects of Violent Conflict on Women’s Intra-Household Decision-Making Power

Abstract

Does exposure to civil war during childhood affect women’s later-life intra-household decision-making power? This paper examines the long-term effects of early-life exposure to the Nigerian Civil War on women’s decision-making power within the household, using data from the 2008 Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey. To identify the effects, we adopt a difference-in-differences approach which exploits variation in exposure to the civil war by year of birth and ethnicity. The results show that early-life exposure to the war decreases the likelihood of women’s decision-making power within the household in adulthood. Likely mechanisms include different fertility and marriage choices as well as poorer education, health, and employment outcomes as a result of exposure to the war, which would place women in a more precarious position in the household relative to their partners.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editor and two anonymous referees for their suggestions that have greatly improved the paper. The survey data used in this article can be obtained from the website of the Demographic and Health Surveys using the following link: https://dhsprogram.com/data/dataset/Nigeria_Standard-DHS_2008.cfm?flag=0. The Stata code used to generate the results in this article are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the terms decision-making power and intra-household bargaining power interchangeably.

2. The effects of early life events such as exposure to civil war in utero and during infancy are related to the foetal origins hypothesis and the critical programming period. Shocks related particularly to the first 1,000 days of the child’s life (including in utero) are presumed to have deleterious consequences in later life (Barker, 1990; Majid, 2015).

3. These three main regions were subsequently demarcated into six geopolitical zones, namely the northeast, northwest, north-central, south-south, south-west and south-east, the latter being the region where the civil war was fought. These six regions are further divided into 36 states.

4. The study uses only the 2008 wave of the Nigerian DHS because a significant number of women that were exposed to the war in childhood were not eligible for interview in the 2013 DHS based on their age. The Nigerian DHS interviews women within the age range of 15–49. Those born in 1967, immediately when the civil war started, were 46 years in 2013 and hence only a small sample of war-exposed women would have been included in the 2013 sample. Further, we are unable to use the 2003 Nigerian DHS because information on ethnicity provided in the two waves are not consistent. While the 2003 DHS provided information on 79 ethnicities, the 2008 DHS recorded only 11 ethnicities, and some of the ethnicities captured in the 2003 wave are not captured in the 2008 wave. To ensure consistency, we omitted the 2003 DHS wave from our analysis and used only the 2008 DHS wave.

5. Although not shown in Table 1, the data indicate that 11 per cent of women were sole decision-makers on their health, 7 per cent were sole decision-makers on large household purchases, 20 per cent were sole decision-makers on household purchases for daily needs, and 13 per cent were sole decision-makers on visits to relatives and family. As an additional check, we created a set of binary dependent variables equal to one if the women was the sole decision-maker on each item (zero otherwise) and we found our regression results were telling a similar story. These additional estimations can be made available by the authors on request.

6. To try and address the problem of migration, these papers restrict their samples to those who had never moved since birth, but in doing so they lose approximately 50 per cent of their initial sample (Gutierrez & Gallegos, 2016; La Mattina & Shemyakina, 2017) probably because small-distance migrations are also being captured (that is within state or subplace movements). This is likely to lead to biased results.

7. Akresh et al. (2017) and Almond, Currie, and Duque (2018) identified the following as the reasons negative shocks in early-life matter: (i) early childhood is characterised by a period of rapid growth and children are highly sensitive to nutritional deprivation and (ii) negative shocks alter the developmental path through changes in tissue structure and metabolic and endocrine processes.