When I was a teenager, I remember how devastated I became when I saw a homeless Chadian family with little children, coming from the far north part of the country and begging for a shelter in a cold morning in Yaounde, Cameroon. My soul became very sorrowful and I started crying incessantly, not only because I was unable to undertake any effective action to help but mostly given that our 100 sq. meter house already full of 9 people was too small to accommodate another family. The GARE family was only one out of thousands who were forcibly displaced, fleeing the first and second Chadian civil war and aiming for a better life in the political capital of the Central Africa sub region haven of peace: Cameroon.
Later on, this childhood experience has nurtured my curiosity to study how shocks experienced by parents might impact on the health of their children in the long run. I then decided after my graduate studies to dedicate my PhD research on the inter generational impacts of conflict on second generation health outcomes. My current research under the scope of my World Bank -DFID fellowship with the Fragility Conflict and Violence group constitutes a perfect extension of my PhD job market paper with a focus placed on children in host communities rather than those whose parents did not migrate during the conflict.
One of the main goal of my research is to show that refugees’ or IDPs’ impacts on host communities could last and carry over to the next generation of children, born years after the massive arrival of forcibly displaced populations in Tanzania and Burundi.
I am currently working towards producing two high quality research papers to inform policy makers on the magnitude of the long-term effects of hosting refugees and IDPs on the health of the second generation of children. By unravelling key mechanisms and moderators, our results should provide guidance to Governmental and Non-governmental organizations such as the World Bank, the UNHCR or the IDMC on how and where the support to host communities should be provided, long time after refugees and IDPs’ massive inflow.
