The Standard Playbook cannot Protect Human Capital in Conflict Zones

In fragile, conflict and violence affected (FCV) settings, homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods do not fail in parallel — their failures compound, amplify one another, and produce damage that sector-by-sector responses systematically underestimate. But what does this mean for policy?

In the first blog, we showed how conflict, and violence destroy human capital across three interconnected settings — the home, the neighborhood, and the workplace — and how their failures reinforce one another. That diagnosis has a direct implication: if the mechanism of destruction is compounding, the response must match that logic.

Country data makes the point. The Central African Republic and South Sudan score well below comparable-income stable countries on the World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI+). Despite relatively low battle-death counts in these countries, evidence shows that chronic low-intensity conflict alone is sufficient to trap them at the bottom of the human capital distribution. Ukraine, by contrast, faces the highest conflict intensity among middle-income countries, yet maintains an HCI+ score within the stable range, showing that institutions provide a buffer that lower-income FCV countries do not have. Colombia or Brazil occupy an interesting position: despite substantial chronic violence, their human capital outcomes stand well above the FCV cluster, suggesting that sustained investments in human capital (in cash transfers, school feeding programs, community health systems) and violence reduction can partially mitigate erosion, but cannot eliminate it.

What determines whether a country escapes the human capital trap is not conflict intensity alone, but its interaction with institutions that existed before violence took hold. For most low-income FCV countries, that stock is thin, making early investment both more difficult and more urgent than anywhere else.

Address Violence Directly

FCV countries are not simply poorer versions of stable ones. At any given income level, they systematically underperform across every major human development indicator. The problem is not poverty per se, but violence itself: disrupting services, distorting behaviors, and creating self-reinforcing cycles that income growth alone cannot break. That means treating security not as a precondition for development, but as one of its core components.

No human development project can fully deliver on its objectives if people cannot safely reach it. The Afghanistan Health Emergency Response project embedded mobile health teams and community health workers into its delivery architecture precisely because roads and clinics couldn’t be assumed as safely accessible.

In Jamaica, the Integrated Community Development project combined infrastructure upgrading with conflict mediation. A 2021 survey found that close to 90 percent of beneficiaries reported positive feelings about their community, compared to just 21 percent before the project began. These design features also reflect the realization that in FCV settings, security is not the responsibility of another ministry or another project but a core element of service delivery. When violence falls, school attendance rises, clinics fill, and economic activity normalizes. The causal arrow runs both ways.

Embed Psychosocial Support 

A recurring failure across FCV programming is treating psychosocial recovery as optional. Trauma is an active mechanism through which failure in one domain transmits to another. A school that ignores children's exposure to violence will have poor learning outcomes. A job training program that ignores trauma will have high dropout rates. One in five people who have experienced conflict in the previous 10 years developed mental health disorders, with rates rising to 40 percent or higher among refugees and conflict-exposed children.

The evidence is clear: programs that combine cash transfers with coaching, mentoring, and psychosocial support consistently outperform training-only approaches. In Pakistan, entrepreneurs who received both a cognitive behavioral therapy-based intervention and a cash grant had nearly 50 percent lower odds of mental health problems than those who received cash alone and the gains grew over time. Psychosocial support must be embedded in how teachers teach, how health workers engage, and how livelihoods facilitators structure group sessions.

The stakes compound across time. Wars create multigenerational trauma: longitudinal studies of former child soldiers in Mozambique found that household and community supports were the primary drivers of positive adult outcomes decades later. In Palestine, 58 percent of adults showed depressive symptoms in 2022 (rising to 71 percent in Gaza) equivalent to 8.9 percent of GDP in lost productivity. Grief, fear, broken trust, eroded hope: these are as real as any infrastructure gap.

Integrate Responses across Sectors and Places

The 2026 Human Capital report's core message that no single sector owns human capital outcomes applies with particular force in FCV settings.

A health project that does not account for collapsed roads. A school that does not account for the violence that keeps children home. An economic inclusion program that does not account for the trauma. Each addresses a real problem while leaving the connections between them untouched. In settings where all three environments fail simultaneously, this is not good enough. The alternative is a place-based response: one that targets a defined geographic area and builds the connections that allow sector operations to reinforce rather than ignore each other.

Medellin’s Urban Transformation in Colombia, which combined transport, public libraries and educational programs, and targeted policing, produced a 90 percent reduction in homicide rates over two decades. Critically, it was built on a participatory model that made residents co-authors of the change, generating trust and social cohesion that no infrastructure investment alone could have produced.  

Make Economic Inclusion a Recovery Tool 

Education and health investments build human capital. Economic inclusion is what converts it into something a household can actually live on. In FCV settings, that conversion frequently does not happen. Markets have collapsed, employers have fled, financial systems have broken down, and displacement and violence have severed the social networks that connect people to opportunity. Jobs do not come after stability is achieved, they are one of the instruments that makes recovery possible.

Public works programs in fragile settings can stabilize incomes and rebuild infrastructure, but only if both objectives are embedded in design from the start.

In the Central African Republic, the LONDO project combined temporary employment with labor-intensive reconstruction, reaching 35,500 vulnerable households while rebuilding over 2,000 kilometers of rural roads. Impact evaluations found a lasting 10 percent increase in monthly earnings among participants well after the program ended along with gains in assets and shock-coping capacity, restoring state presence in areas previously controlled by armed groups.

Design Gender-responsive Approaches

Conflict does not simply add hardship on top of gender inequality, it amplifies it by destroying precisely the pathways most available to girls, such as education or formal employment. In the Sahel, over 90 percent of economic inclusion program beneficiaries are women. Every design element, from session timing, to grant size to community sensitization was built from the start. The persistent problem is not absence of guidance but its consistent application.  

Responses that wait for peace, work within single sectors, treat economic inclusion as an afterthought, dismiss psychosocial support as optional, and fail to center women are not built for what conflict actually does. The question is not whether we know what works as the evidence shows we do. The question is whether the next generation will still be waiting for it to be applied.

This is part of a series examining human capital measurement in fragile and conflict-affected settings.