The Role of Social and Humanitarian Assistance for Supporting Lives and Livelihoods During the 2021-2022 Tigray Crisis

Little is known about how conflict and climate interact with social assistance to affect poverty and livelihoods outcomes. Even less is understood about how conflicts disrupt government- and donor-provided social assistance, and whether emergency humanitarian assistance can fill provision gaps in situations of acute crisis. This paper draws on a bespoke household panel dataset collected in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, just before and after the recent Tigray conflict reached the study area. In addition to the acute conflict spilling over into Amhara, enduring climate variability and drought have been hallmarks of vulnerability and food insecurity in the region for decades. The data provides a rare opportunity to study conflict impacts on households and the role of the national Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) and humanitarian support. We are interested in how government-provided assistance and humanitarian assistance mediate the impacts of conflict on food security and poverty in climate-stressed environments.

We find that while conflict significantly and negatively predicts impacts across nearly all the outcome indicators, negative climate shocks were equally harmful to outcomes. This suggests that an effective strategy would be to lean into climate-related interventions even during acute conflicts; for instance, through continuing public works interventions where possible, or ensuring continued support to livelihoods resilience initiatives even if at a reduced level. Multiple crises require multiple interventions. The results illustrate that as the PSNP rolls back and conflict scales up, humanitarian assistance supports many people who are no longer served by the PSNP – a heartening dynamic. An analysis considering only the PSNP would conclude it had not positively impacted livelihoods. Yet, when considered alongside other support forms in a dynamic way, we see that households experiencing higher levels of conflict were served by a sequencing and combination of both the PSNP and humanitarian aid over the period in question. This research highlights the need to coordinate support through different providers during multiple crises, especially when the state is unable to provide it.