materials only to younger grades, and humanitarian agencies have been providing some genderspecific interventions to some regions more than others (e.g., OCHA 2019; World Bank 2020b; etc.). Although the education interventions in this setting are not extensive and there were no reported disruptions to these operations during the time period under analysis, disruptions to education interventions in other settings could mistakenly be attributed to the severity of violence.40

# **Section 7. Conclusion**

We demonstrated how a series of sharp, conflict-related incidents impacted school attendance in one of the most volatile and protracted conflicts in the world. There is little evidence that living in close proximity to violence- either the onset of sharp and unexpected violent campaigns, or the severity of all violence- had strong impacts on school attendance. Rather, we demonstrated that other conflict-related issues that affect the country more broadly than the location of violence can have a stronger impact on school attendance. Combined, these results suggest that targeting of limited resources for education should also consider factors other than the location of violence.

However, there are a number of issues unexplored by this analysis. First, the analysis focuses on a measure of school attendance and there are a number of other issues that impact the quality of schooling that cannot be analyzed in this setting. For example, it might still be the case that children are attending school in more violent regions, but the quality of schooling is still worse in those regions than the schooling received in less violent regions. However, in the current environment, it is more difficult to capture measures of the quality of schooling using available data and this is an issue that needs to be addressed in future work.

Second, these findings are representative of the mobile phone-using population, and segments of the population that potentially have worse access to mobile phones might be underrepresented. It is possible that the impacts of violence could be different for children at different points of the welfare distribution, and these results might not generalize to those underrepresented populations. However, given the inability of conducting traditional face-to-face surveys in the current environment, it is difficult to incorporate these populations directly. There are some attempts at performing key informant interviews (e.g., OCHA 2019a; World Bank 2020b; etc.), but more alternative survey methodologies need to be utilized to better understand the challenges facing these populations.

And lastly, it is important to emphasize that these results do not imply that violence is unimportant to school attendance in Yemen. Rather, these findings suggest that marginal and temporary changes in the severity of violence after prolonged conflict do not have a direct impact on school attendance. It is possible that the households that are most sensitive to violence had already taken their children out of school before the survey period, or it is possible that households will not let their children attend school until they feel the decline in violence is permanent and the conflict is over. Thus, it is possible that interventions that reduce

> 40That is not to say that violence could not also cause a disruption to these services. But that it is possible that non-violent conflict related shocks could also be responsible.

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