Do social and humanitarian assistance mediate the impacts of conflict on lives and livelihoods? Lessons from Ethiopia during the Tigray crisis

• The paper examines how conflict disrupts social assistance and whether humanitarian aid can fill gaps during crises. • The analysis uses household panel data from Amhara to show how conflict and climate shocks affect poverty and food security. • When the PSNP was curtailed by conflict, humanitarian aid filled the gap, highlighting benefits of coordinated support. • The study assesses how social and humanitarian aid mediate conflict and climate shocks on income, food security, and poverty. Little is known about how conflict interacts with social assistance to affect poverty and livelihoods outcomes. Even less is understood about how conflicts disrupt government- and donor-provided social assistance, and whether humanitarian emergency assistance can fill provision gaps in situations of acute crisis. This paper draws on an exceptional and bespoke household panel dataset collected in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, just before and after the conflict in the neighbouring Tigray region spilled over into the study area in 2021 In addition to the impacts of conflict spillovers into Amhara, climate variability and drought have been hallmarks of vulnerability and food insecurity in the region for decades. Our data provides a rare opportunity to study the interaction between conflict and assistance, whilst controlling for drought which has long shaped vulnerability in the study area. The paper provides new evidence of how social assistance and humanitarian assistance can complement each other to mediate the impacts of conflict on food security and poverty in climate-stressed environments. The results demonstrate that, as the PSNP was curtailed and conflict erupted and intensified, humanitarian assistance supported many people including those no longer served by the PSNP – a heartening dynamic. This demonstrates a promising picture of what coordination across historically fragmented sectors can achieve.