Estimating child mortality attributable to war in Yemen

Quantifying the burden of war (BOW) beyond battle deaths is often impossible in ongoing conflicts. Consequently, indirect consequences of war can be overlooked in public BOW discussions. This paper aims to introduce a simulation model to estimate indirect child mortality attributable to war. Yemen was chosen as the example case because indirect child mortality from war likely outpaces direct casualties in the Yemen conflict.

A fixed effects panel regression was used to estimate elasticities between child mortality rate (CMR) (the rate of deaths among children under five years of age, per 1,000 live births) and two effects of war assumed to have the greatest explanatory power toward CMR: economic deterioration (measured by changes GDP per capita) and conflict magnitude (via the Major Episodes of Political Violence dataset). These elasticities were then used in a model to estimate the CMR in Yemen up to the year 2020.

Regression results suggest that Yemen’s CMR increased by more than 50 per cent from 54.2 in 2010 to 83.9 in 2017. If this trend continues, the mean CMR will almost double from its 2010 value to 102.9 in 2020. By 2020, the model estimates cumulative child deaths at over 185,000.

Lack of information about the indirect consequences of war biases the tradeoff between humanitarian and military objectives toward the latter. This information asymmetry can prolong conflicts. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to more informed debate and humanitarian programming by making vital information accessible to the public and decision-makers.