The long-term impact of war on children is written in broken schools, dry taps and vanishing safety nets

The long-term impact of war on children is written in broken schools, dry taps and vanishing safety nets | Photo: Ivan Aleksic

Published on 14 April 2026 at 05:17 GMT

By Editorial Team SDG16

War does not end for children when front lines shift or ceasefires are announced. Its longest shadow often falls afterwards, when schools stay shut, water systems fail, families remain displaced, and the institutions meant to protect children no longer function. In practical terms, that means childhood is reorganised around interruption, insecurity and loss, often for years. War damages childhood long after the fighting moves on.

The scale of that disruption is immense. By the end of 2024, UNHCR estimated that 123.2 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced, including about 49 million children, or 40 per cent of the total. UNICEF data show that 48.8 million children were displaced by conflict and violence alone. Displacement on that scale is not a temporary humanitarian inconvenience. It alters whether children can enrol in school, receive vaccinations, access food support, prove their identity, or remain connected to relatives and carers. Displacement turns survival into a full-time condition.

Education is usually one of the first systems to collapse and one of the hardest to rebuild. In January 2025, Education Cannot Wait said 234 million school-aged children in crisis settings required urgent support to access quality education, including 85 million who were out of school. A separate 2024 analysis by Save the Children found that around 103 million children in conflict and fragile countries were out of school, roughly one in three. When a school is bombed, occupied, or turned into a shelter, the damage is not only physical. It severs routine, social contact, nutrition support, and one of the few places where distress or abuse may be noticed by adults outside the family. When schools collapse, children lose far more than lessons.

The assault on education has become more systematic. UNESCO reported a 44 per cent increase in attacks on educational facilities in 2024. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, or GCPEA, documented around 6,000 reported attacks on education and incidents of military use of schools and universities in 2022 and 2023, harming more than 10,000 students and educators. These numbers matter because prolonged school interruption is strongly associated with lower future earnings, earlier marriage for girls in some contexts, higher protection risks, and weaker prospects of social recovery after war. Attacks on schools reshape a child’s future, not just a semester.

Water scarcity deepens the crisis in quieter but equally devastating ways. Conflict destroys pumps, pipes, treatment plants and power supplies, while displacement puts sudden pressure on already weak local systems. UNICEF warns that water scarcity limits access to safe drinking water and hygiene at home, in schools and in health facilities, and increases the risk of disease outbreaks such as cholera. Globally, four billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year, and by 2040 around one in four children is expected to live in areas of extremely high water stress. In war zones, those structural pressures become immediate threats. A closed school may reopen more quickly than a destroyed water network. A child cannot learn, heal or stay healthy without safe water.

That matters for girls in particular. Where water is scarce and sanitation systems are degraded, girls are more likely to miss school, shoulder household water collection, or face heightened safety risks travelling to water points or latrines. Babies and younger children face increased exposure to water-borne disease and malnutrition. In many conflicts, water infrastructure is not only collateral damage but part of a wider collapse in municipal services. The result is a layered emergency in which illness, hunger and school absence reinforce one another. Water scarcity in war is a child protection issue as much as a public health one.

Trauma is another long war, one that adults often underestimate because it is less visible than rubble. WHO notes that childhood and adolescence are critical stages for mental health, and that traumatic exposure can shape long-term development. Evidence reviewed in the WHO Bulletin in 2025 found that mental health and psychosocial support interventions can reduce post-traumatic stress symptoms in children and adolescents in humanitarian settings. That is an important finding because it suggests trauma is not simply an inevitable residue of war, it is a public health burden that can be treated if systems and funding exist. Trauma in conflict is not invisible, it is under-served. 

Yet war rarely destroys only one service at a time. It tends to erode the whole web of basic social protection that helps families absorb shocks. Cash transfers stop when administrative systems fail. Child benefits disappear when budgets collapse. Caseworkers vanish. Registries are destroyed or become inaccessible. Schools, clinics and local welfare offices stop functioning together, which means families face impossible trade-offs between transport, rent, medicine and food. When social protection systems fail, children carry the deficit in their bodies and futures. UNICEF reported in 2025 that roughly 1.6 billion children globally still lack any form of social protection coverage. In fragile and humanitarian settings, that gap is especially dangerous because conflict also shrinks governments’ fiscal space and weakens their ability to finance essential services.

This is where the language of humanitarian relief can obscure the deeper problem. Emergency aid can save lives, but it cannot substitute indefinitely for functioning public systems. Cash assistance can help a displaced family pay for food or transport, but it cannot fully replace a national education system, a local water utility, a public health network and a child protection workforce. The long-term impact of war on children is therefore not only a story of direct exposure to violence. It is also a story of institutional disappearance. Children do not recover fully where public systems remain absent.

Several civil society organisations have tried to hold that broader picture in view. Save the Children has highlighted the scale of conflict-related school exclusion. War Child has focused on mental health and child protection in war-affected settings. The Norwegian Refugee Council has repeatedly warned that protracted displacement leaves children stuck outside education and basic services for years. International Rescue Committee programmes in conflict settings increasingly combine emergency relief with health, protection and education support, reflecting the reality that these needs are inseparable. Their role is significant, but they cannot replace states, and most do not claim to.

The issue also sits squarely within the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, though war makes those targets harder rather than easier to reach. The clearest links are to SDG 4, quality education, SDG 3, good health and well-being, SDG 6, clean water and sanitation, and SDG 16, peace, justice and strong institutions. The connection is not symbolic. If children are displaced, traumatised, out of school, and cut off from water and social protection, progress across those goals is materially reversed. Conflict is not a separate development issue, it is one of the main forces undoing development. War pushes SDG progress into reverse for children first. 

What follows for children can last into adulthood. Interrupted education reduces lifetime opportunity. Untreated trauma can affect relationships, concentration and physical health. Poor sanitation and repeated displacement increase disease and malnutrition risks. Lost documentation and broken welfare systems can leave families trapped outside formal support long after violence subsides. Those patterns help explain why countries facing repeated or prolonged conflict accumulate what researchers and aid agencies increasingly describe as a conflict penalty, a persistent loss of human development that compounds over generations. The deepest damage of war is often cumulative, civilian and generational. 

For policymakers, the implication is clear enough. Protecting children in war means more than condemning violence against them. It requires treating schools, water systems and child benefits as essential civilian infrastructure, not secondary concerns. It means funding mental health alongside food and shelter. It means rebuilding registries, municipal services and classrooms quickly enough that displacement does not harden into permanent exclusion. Above all, it means recognising that the long-term impact of war on children is not only a humanitarian aftermath. It is a test of whether societies can restore the ordinary structures that make childhood possible. Reconstruction that ignores children’s systems is not real recovery. 

Further information:

·       Save the Children, relevant for its research and advocacy on children excluded from school in conflict and fragile settings. https://www.savethechildren.net

·       War Child, relevant for its work on mental health, protection and education for children affected by armed conflict. https://www.warchild.org.uk

·       Norwegian Refugee Council, relevant for its field reporting and programmes on displacement, education and civilian protection. https://www.nrc.no

·       International Rescue Committee, relevant for its integrated work on health, protection, education and emergency support in conflict settings. https://www.rescue.org

·       Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, relevant for tracking attacks on schools and advocating protection of education during war. https://protectingeducation.org