Colombian Armed Conflict and its Effects on Fertility Agendas, 2000 – 2010

The lack of reliable data on political conflict and the difficulties of properly measure fertility decisions under social and economic disruption make of the estimation of effects of conflict over fertility one of the most difficult questions within the Demography of Conflict. We propose a methodology that can be implemented for countries under conflict with access to Demographic and Health Surveys, combined with a good proxy for political violence, by applying multiple generalized equations. We present the results for the Colombian case that combines the retrospective information from DHS 2005 and 2010, homicides by age and sex and population counts per municipality from DANE (Colombia´s official statistical office ) and records of outlaw and army/police initiated armed actions collected by Humans Rights Observatory of Presidency of Colombia (HROPC). As a result we found that there are differential effects by residence (rural vs. urban) and over time, as the conflict has reduced its intensity in the decade under study, and more importantly opposite direction on the effects whether the violence was caused by an intervention by outlaw armed groups or official groups.