strike that more than doubled the incidence of children not attending school in affected regions, and even led to an increase in children not attending school nationally, has received little-to-no attention by the international media.7 Given the difficulty of identifying all the significant events to which interventions need to be sensitive in a conflict setting that is being actively followed, it is likely even more difficult to try and identify many of the effects of conflictrelated shocks using data on educational attainment by cohorts collected decades after conflict has ended. In order to better inform possible education interventions in the midst of protracted conflicts, it is important to perform more data collection during conflict and to further closely monitor reports from key informants, news organizations, and humanitarian organizations to fully understand the conflict-related events happening on the ground.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the background of the conflict and education in Yemen; Section 3 describes the data; Section 4 reports the correlation between school attendance and violence in the district of residence of the entire sample; Section 5 reports the impacts of the four major shocks on school attendance; Section 6 provides an example illustrating how conflict shocks aside from the proximity to violence can potentially be misattributed; and Section 7 concludes.

# **Section 2. Background**

Houthi forces from the north of the country, upset with the outcome of a transition to a new constitution following the Arab Spring, began an assault on the national government in 2014 (e.g., Baron 2015). They captured the capital Sana’a, and then captured much of the south of the country. Beginning in March 2015, the conflict significantly escalated after a coalition of nine countries began an extensive bombing campaign to recover the territory captured by Houthi forces (e.g., World Bank 2017b). During the period under analysis, Houthi forces were the de facto authorities (DFA) in most of the north of the country, and the IRG controlled most of the south of the country. Aside from the IRG, the DFA, and the coalition of nine countries supporting the IRG, there were also a variety of other actors that were involved in the conflict during the time period under analysis, including southern secessionists and terrorist organizations (e.g., Amnesty International 2019).

There were a number of ways the conflict potentially affected access to education in the country. Increased violence and fragility- from both ground troops and airstrikes- limited the ability of children to safely attend school in regions that experienced the most violence. Previous surveys and key informant interviews conducted by UNICEF identified declines in safety as one of the many reasons why children might not be attending school (e.g., OCHA 2020; etc.). The manner in which safety declined varies across the different regions and over time. For example, in Taizz, the third largest city in Yemen, the front lines of the war bisected the city and children had to make their way to school amid active fighting and snipers (e.g., Doucet 2020); in some instances, there were active ground battles surrounding military

> 7This is in contrast to events that are widely reported but have limited effects on access to education and other dimensions of welfare, such as the capture of the IRG capital by secessionists or the currency depreciation following the Houthis no longer accepting new bank notes printed by the IRG (e.g., WFP 2019a; WFP 2020).

5