Airahb/conflict-digital-access

Replication package for MSc thesis: how armed conflict shapes women's information and digital access across Nigeria, DRC, Ethiopia, Jordan, and Tajikistan using 18 DHS survey waves (2007–2024). # 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, …