More than half a million Rohingya refugees, 60% of them children (UNICEF 2017), have crossed the border into Bangladesh, joining refugee camps or settling informally, and are in dire need of basic services such as food, health care, and protection. To support their humanitarian intervention in the fields of health, nutrition, wellbeing and protection, UNICEF requested this rapid evidence review.
We evaluate the effectiveness of a post-conflict development programme on maternal health-care utilization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Our work varies from conventional impact evaluation studies because of the inclusion of two post-conflict psychosocial risks: the household’s actual experience of violence, and subjective perceptions about violence, as key determinants of programme effectiveness.Following the difference-indifference estimator, and propensity score matching method this study establishes that the post-conflict development programme undertaken by Chittagong Hill Tracts Development Facility of the United Nations Development Programme is successful in improving maternal health-care utilization.
Despite this, forced settlement by outsiders, household experiences of conflict, and perceptions of insecurity lower maternal health-care utilization. The effectiveness of the programme would have been greater in the absence of conflict, although the programme may have mitigated some experiences of past conflict. The intervention fails to significantly narrow the inter-ethnic gap in terms of health-care utilization,
