IPA is collaborating with the UN Peacebuilding Fund and Landmine Action (LMA) to evaluate LMA’s innovative ex-combatant reintegration program in Liberia.
From 2009 to 2011, IPA will follow more than 1,500 ex-combatants via surveys and an in-depth ethnographic study. Landmine Action will draw half of these youth out of illegal sectors, train them in agriculture, provide counseling, and resettle graduates in their home communities, where they will be allocated land to raise crops and animals for cash.
The randomized intervention will investigate whether Landmine Action’s intensive reintegration program can accomplish what more modest programs have not:
- produce high levels of legitimate rural employment;
- substitute military chains of command with ties to community and kin;
- reduce aggression and violence;
- increase respect for democratic and traditional governance; and
- minimize recidivism.
In addition, the evaluation intends to answer several related reintegration and peacebuilding questions:
- How do increases in income, employment and stability affect long term aggression, social and political life?
- What is the process of individual transformation? What program components matter most?
- How do pre-existing traits–wartime experiences, psychological distress, aggression, illiteracy, family support–shape an ex-combatant’s ability to reintegrate? What factors predict failure or success?
Principal Researchers
- Chris Blattman
- Jeannie Annan
Evaluation activities are supported by Mattias Lundberg and Gwendolyn Taylor of the World Bank HDCYN, with financing from the Bank’s Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund and the Italian Trust Fund for Children and Youth in Africa.
Background and Program
A national demobilization, disarmament, reinsertion and reintegration (DDRR) program has successfully reintegrated tens of thousands of ex-combatants, but many thousands of young men and women–often the “hard-core”–have been poorly served by the official program.
These youth remain unemployed or engage in illegal activities, such as mining, logging, rubber tapping, and drugs. Armed group chain-of-command structures remain in place, and so these youth are especially susceptible to re-recruitment. The U.N. Peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL) regards these “hotspots” as the number one threat to peace and stability in this fragile state.
Landmine Action, an international NGO based in London, has developed an innovative reintegration program that brings together intensive agricultural skills training, conflict resolution skills and experience, literacy and numeracy training, assistance returning to home communities, and help starting a small agricultural enterprise.
The classes to be evaluated begin in September 2009 and will be followed up in mid-2010 and beyond.
Evaluation Strategy
Hundreds of ex-combatants will be interviewed and screen by LMA staff in two major hotspots: mining regions in Gbarpolu County and illicit rubber tappers in Sinoe County. Each registrant will have an equal opportunity to enter the program, with admission determined by a public lottery.
Youth in the randomized program and control groups will be surveyed before and after the program. To study the process of transformation and change, a small number of youth (plus their teachers, friends and family members) will be interviewed multiple times by local qualitative research assistants.
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