opportunity to track how attendance responds to a variety of conflict-related shocks.

However, in order to accurately identify the factors that most affect schooling during active conflict, it is necessary for mobile phone penetration to be high and for access to mobile phones to be relatively unaffected by important conflict-related shocks. Evidence from the last nationally-representative survey in 2014 suggests that access to mobile phones was high prior to the conflict, and evidence from the WFP mobile phone surveys suggests that access has remained high during the conflict. Additionally, there is no evidence that any of the shocks analyzed here affect either the number of active mobile phone numbers in a household or other household characteristics that are unlikely to rapidly change. Thus, although the survey misses households without access to mobile phones who potentially have worse access to education, the relatively high penetration of mobile phones allows an analysis that is representative of the majority of the population.3 Using the WFP surveys, we illustrate a number of patterns in access to schooling during the conflict in Yemen. First, we demonstrate that sudden changes in violence and fragility (e.g., conflict fatalities) need not lead to a change in access to schooling in all cases. In particular, we estimate the change in school attendance in response to southern secessionists capturing the capital of the internationally-recognized government (IRG), a partial ceasefire unofficially declared by the de facto authorities in the north (DFA) and Saudi Arabia, and in response to a sudden and violent campaign led by the DFA to capture a northern governorate from the IRG. Each event was unexpected, caused a substantial change in violence, and one of these events had a significant impact on peoples’ livelihoods. However, in all cases, there was little change in school attendance in affected regions. These findings are further corroborated by a lack of correlation between violence in the district of residence and school attendance for the entire sample of households.

And second, we demonstrate that other conditions associated with conflict aside from the location of violence can have a large impact on access to education. The distrust of the IRG, insufficient salaries for teachers, and overall poor conditions in schools led to a sudden and voluntary teacher strike in regions controlled by the IRG during the survey period. The strike was directly in response to factors that have been caused by the conflict and have impacted the entire country to a differing degree, but the strike was not directly related to any specific violent event. Importantly, the event is further entwined with the conflict as it has been reported that southern secessionists had been exploiting these frustrations to help incite the strike.4 The duration of the strike was longer than many of the rapid escalations of violence experienced during the conflict, and like many incidents of violence, the shock impacted the ability of schools to remain open.

Following the strike, there was a more than doubling of households in IRG-held areas that had school-aged children not attending school. In specifications comparing the impacts

> 3Additionally, there is the possibility that selection bias in who is more likely to respond to a phone survey could impact the results. However, the mobile phone survey has been able to detect significant changes in access to education, food security, and access to basic services that have been identified by independent sources. 4For example, see http://aden-tm.net/NDetails.aspx?contid=110777.

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