By 2030, nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence.
Think of a neighborhood where the school is open, but children are too afraid to walk to it. Where the health clinic exists, but staff have fled. Where a parent wants to work but businesses are closed. Now ask yourself: are these issues independent or cumulative? Is each one making the others worse? This is what this blog is about: the ways fragility, conflict, and violence interact to erode human capital across homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces.
We already know some of the numbers. By 2030, nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) and as of mid-2024, almost 123 million people were forcibly displaced, the largest such crisis in recorded history. According to the Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+), a child born there will, on average, reach only 41 percent of her productive potential. While we cite these numbers all the time, what we haven't fully reckoned with is not just how much conflict destroys but how it destroys, and why recovery is so extraordinarily difficult.
The 2026 Human Capital report, Building Human Capital Where It Matters: Homes, Neighborhoods, and Workplaces, offers exactly that kind of reframing. Rather than measuring human capital only at the country level and looking for national policy levers, the report shifts attention to the micro-environments where human capital is actually built: the home where a child spends her first years, the neighborhood she grows up in, the workplace where she will eventually - or not - accumulate skills as an adult. In FCV contexts, all three settings collapse simultaneously, and their failures reinforce and amplify one another in ways far more damaging than any sector-by-sector analysis would predict.
Homes: Where Human Capital Begins, and Where Conflict Strikes First
The home is the first and most formative environment for human development, which also makes it the site where violence hits hardest. Chronic exposure to violence changes how children's brains develop — impairing memory and attention in ways that affect how much they absorb even when they are sitting in a classroom. Less visible, but equally consequential, is what conflict does to caregiving. A mother dealing with PTSD is less able to respond to her infant's cues or to provide stimulation that shapes cognitive development more than almost anything else. Maternal depression is also directly linked to child malnutrition, stunting, lower birth weight, and reduced immunization, deficits that compound across childhood, resetting the baseline for the next generation.
Girls bear a disproportionate share of this burden. Nearly half of upper-secondary-age girls in Sub-Saharan African fragile states are out of school. Conflict-affected areas also see higher rates of child marriage, with consequences that extend well beyond the girls themselves: women who marry before the age of 18 are more likely to experience obstetric complications and to have children who are stunted. Gender-based violence also surges inside the home during conflict. In humanitarian contexts, an estimated 70 percent of women experience gender-based violence, roughly double the global rate. Beyond personal tragedies, this also means fewer resources available for children's nutrition, care, and schooling.
Workplaces or Where Employment, Productive Capacity and Skills Development are Destroyed
Here's something that often gets left out of the conversation: roughly half of all human capital isn't built in schools but at work, through practice, the use of technology, and interaction with colleagues. Conflict and violence do not just eliminate jobs; they eliminate the environment in which people become more capable. In Ukraine, the war eliminated an estimated 4.8 million jobs in 2022 alone. Beyond the job losses, Conflict destroys machinery, market networks, supply chains, trust and the institutional ecosystems that businesses depend on, and rebuilding them takes far longer than rebuilding physical infrastructure.
Two-thirds of employment in fragile and conflict-affected countries is classified as vulnerable: subsistence farming, informal self-employment, or micro- enterprises - precarious jobs with little room for growth or for skill development. For young people specifically, the consequences are not merely economic. The World Development Report 2011 identified unemployment and idleness as the primary reasons young people cited for joining gangs or armed movements — well ahead of revenge or ideology. Women are hit hardest, at precisely the moment conflict makes their economic participation most necessary. The collapse of the care infrastructure reduces their ability to work even when opportunities exist. In South Sudan, over 40 percent of displacement camp households were female-headed, leaving women with economic responsibility and none of the legal tools to exercise it.
Neighborhoods: The Geography of Opportunity
Where you live shapes what you become. The 2026 Human Capital Report finds that families with identical incomes can have dramatically different outcomes depending on their neighborhood. In Brazil, a low-income child growing up in a low-income neighborhood will earn half as much over a lifetime as a low-income child raised in a higher-income one. In San Salvador, people living in gang-controlled neighborhoods had fewer assets, less income, and lower educational attainment than people living just fifty meters away.
Conflict and violence further distort the geography of opportunity. At the end of 2024, 73 million people were internally displaced due to conflict and violence, a record, driven by surges in Sudan and the DRC. In the first half of 2024 alone, deliberate attacks on health, education, and water infrastructure left millions without access to basic services. Destroyed roads and utilities amplify the problem, and the burden lands hardest on neighborhoods least equipped to absorb it. For women and girls, neighborhood insecurity can have real consequences. In gang-controlled areas across Central America, women alter or abandoned school and work schedules to avoid the risk of sexual violence. A clinic that women cannot safely reach does not reduce maternal mortality. A school that girls cannot safely walk to does not improve enrollment. Infrastructure without safety is not access.
The Compounding Impact of Violence Across Settings
What makes FCV contexts so difficult to recover from is precisely the interaction between these three environments. A traumatized parent is both a less engaged caregiver and a less productive worker. The local employer who might have hired that parent closes, deepening household poverty. The clinic is overwhelmed. The neighborhood is too dangerous to move through safely. Each failure makes the others worse, and the system reaches a low equilibrium.
What I find most sobering is the intergenerational dimension. Children exposed to conflict are more likely to perpetuate violence in adulthood. Without deliberate intervention, individuals exposed to high violence during childhood have roughly a 40 percent probability of surpassing their parents' educational level, compared to over 55 percent for peers in stable contexts. That gap is itself gendered: the pathways most available to girls (education, formal employment, delayed marriage) are precisely those most directly destroyed by conflict.
These gaps will not close on their own. Conflict and violence reset the baseline for the next generation. Unless responses are designed to match the compounding, interlocking nature of what's happening, that is where the baseline will stay.
This post is part of a series examining human capital in fragile, conflict- and violence-affected settings.
Join the Conversation