Conflict, Information Access, and Women’s Digital Exclusion
Airah Balogun · MS International and Development Economics · University of San Francisco · May 2026
Abstract
Armed conflict has well-documented effects on income, health, education, and labor markets, but its consequences for women’s access to information have not been quantified at the individual level across multiple country contexts. This thesis estimates the relationship between conflict exposure and women’s access to traditional media and digital information channels using individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) linked to geocoded conflict event data from ACLED, covering five countries (Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Jordan, and Tajikistan) across 18 survey waves between 2007 and 2024. A two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences specification exploits within-region variation in five-year log conflict intensity. A one-unit increase in log conflict reduces the probability that a woman has weekly exposure to any of television, radio, or newspaper by 5.8 percentage points (p < 0.05) and reduces internet use by 16.2 percentage points (p < 0.01), while mobile-phone ownership is essentially unchanged. The use-versus-ownership asymmetry in digital outcomes, the sharpening of the media effect under a violent-events-only restriction, and the channel-wide deterioration across television, radio, and newspaper jointly point to infrastructure disruption as the dominant mechanism. Social connectedness, measured by Meta’s Social Connectedness Index, does not moderate the conflict effect. A complementary stacked-sample specification finds that the marginal conflict effect on information access does not differ systematically by gender. The findings extend the empirical conflict literature to the information environment and argue for treating telecommunications and broadcast continuity as a humanitarian priority alongside food, shelter, and medical care.
Key Results
| Outcome | Conflict effect | p-value |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly media access (TV, radio, or newspaper) | −5.8 pp | < 0.05 |
| Internet use (past 12 months) | −16.2 pp | < 0.01 |
| Mobile phone ownership | ~0 | n.s. |
A one-unit increase in log five-year cumulative conflict intensity per 100,000 population. TWFE specification with country + wave fixed effects, standard errors clustered by region.
Data and Methods
- Survey data: DHS Individual Recode (IR) files — 18 waves, 5 countries, ~331,000 women (2007–2024)
- Conflict data: ACLED geocoded conflict events aggregated to DHS admin-1 regions
- Population: WorldPop 100m rasters for per-capita conflict scaling
- Social connectedness: Meta Social Connectedness Index (admin-1 level)
- Identification: Two-way fixed effects (country + wave) exploiting within-region variation in 5-year log conflict intensity
- Robustness: Urban subsample, 1-year conflict window, wild cluster bootstrap, husband-characteristics controls
Countries and Waves
| Country | Waves | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Nigeria | 4 | 2008, 2013, 2018, 2024 |
| DR Congo | 3 | 2007, 2013, 2023 |
| Ethiopia | 2 | 2011, 2016 |
| Jordan | 4 | 2007, 2012/2014, 2017, 2023 |
| Tajikistan | 3 | 2012, 2017, 2023 |
| Yemen | 1 | 2013 (media proxy only) |
Policy Implications
- Telecommunications continuity is a humanitarian priority. Conflict knocks women offline through infrastructure destruction — broadcast and cellular systems should be protected alongside food, shelter, and medical care.
- Protect overlapping channels. The effect runs uniformly across television, radio, and newspaper. Investing in a single resilient channel is insufficient; redundancy across systems is necessary.
- Focus on keeping connected women online. The conflict penalty falls most heavily on internet use rather than device ownership, suggesting the policy leverage point is connectivity infrastructure, not device distribution.
Replication
All R scripts for data construction, cleaning, and analysis are publicly available in this repository. Raw DHS microdata require a free account at dhsprogram.com; ACLED data at acleddata.com.
See README.md for the full pipeline description and setup instructions.
Citation
Balogun, A. (2026). Conflict, Information Access, and Women's Digital Exclusion.
MS Thesis, Department of Economics, University of San Francisco.
Replication package: github.com/Airahb/conflict-digital-access