Sectoral effects of development aid on post-war violence: spatially disaggregated evidence from the Great Lakes region

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Africa’s Great Lakes region experienced some of the most devastating conflicts in recent history. Following a fragile peace negotiated in the mid-2000s, international donors allocated over $38 billion in development aid to support stabilization across the region. This study evaluates the effectiveness of these efforts through a spatially and sectorally disaggregated analysis of over 100 districts and provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Burundi. To ensure robust inference, I employ a combination of negative binomial regression with coarsened exact matching on subnational administrative units and difference-in-differences estimations on locally defined buffer zones.

The results demonstrate that the impact of development aid on violence is highly contingent on the sectoral orientation of the projects. Health and social protection projects are consistently associated with a statistically significant reduction in violence, while infrastructure-stimulating projects do not affect the occurrence of violence. In contrast, there are indications that education and economic-developing projects could be problematic. Strikingly, these findings mirror evidence from conflict-affected settings in Afghanistan, suggesting broader patterns in how development aid works in fragile environments.

This research highlights the limitations of one-size-fits-all development strategies and underscores the importance of tailoring aid to the political, social, and cultural context of recipient communities. It provides important insights for both policymakers and scholars, calling for a more nuanced and context-sensitive approach to post-conflict development cooperation.