Ghassan Baliki

• PhD
• Research Program Director at ISDC - International Security and Development Center

Governments worldwide responded to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic with various lockdown measures. Restrictions curb the spread of a virus but also cause serious economic challenges. Evidence on how the severity of lockdown policies impacts the economic behaviour of households in low- and middle-income countries over time remains absent. To clo...

Climate change and violent conflict are defining challenges of our time. However, it is not yet understood how they interact in shaping human welfare and food security, how their interaction shapes gendered outcomes, or how social protection systems can mitigate their impact. To address these knowledge gaps, we first examine how household food inse...

The detrimental impacts of wars on human development are well documented across research domains, from public health to micro-economics. However, these impacts are studied in compartmentalized silos, which limits a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of conflicts, hampering our ability to effectively sustain human development. This arti...

Small-scale agricultural and horticultural interventions play a critical role in improving nutrition and food security of vulnerable households in peaceful settings. However, scant rigorous evidence exists on the impacts and sustainability of such interventions in conflict settings. In this paper, we address this knowledge gap by analyzing the shor...

Complex humanitarian emergencies are a main driver of food and nutritional insecurity. Agricultural interventions are key to improving nutrition and food security, and their positive impacts are well-documented in stable developing countries. However, it is unclear if their positive effects on food security hold in complex emergency settings, too....

Background Integrated school and home garden interventions can improve health outcomes in low-income countries, but rigorous evidence remains scarce, particularly for school-aged children and to reduce anemia. Objective We test if an integrated school and home garden intervention, implemented at pilot stage, improves hemoglobin levels among school...

The integration of refugees into host countries’ formal labor markets is increasingly recommended as a durable solution to forced migration. Yet, this policy response is a contentious political topic with little empirical evidence, especially in low- and middle-income host countries available to support policy. This article examines the impacts of...

Agricultural interventions are one of the key policy tools to strengthen the food security of households living in conflict settings. Yet, given the complex nature of conflict-affected settings, existing theories of change might not hold, leading to misinterpretation of the significance and magnitude of these impacts. How contextual factors, includ...

Background Training women in home gardening and nutrition has been shown to increase household production and consumption of nutritious food and contribute to women’s empowerment, but evidence is limited to short-term effects. Here, we investigate whether home garden support leads to long-term improvements in household nutrition and women’s empower...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis affecting everyone. Yet, its challenges and countermeasures vary significantly over time and space. Individual experiences of the pandemic are highly heterogeneous and its impacts span and interlink multiple dimensions, such as health, economic, social and political impacts. Therefore, there is a need to dis...

Definitions of fragility are focused at the level of the state, but this should not be considered to suggest that individuals with heterogeneous endowments experience a state of fragility in the same way. Nor does it suggest that all subregions of a fragile country exist in this state. In turn, experience of fragility varies not just at national le...

Food systems in many countries are experiencing a shift from traditional foods toward processed foods high in sugar, fat and salt, but low in dietary fiber and micronutrients. There is an urgent need to better understand drivers of changing food behavior, particularly for lower-income countries. This study analyzes drivers of food choice among chil...

School gardens have become a widely used approach to influence children's food knowledge, preferences and choices in low-and high-income countries alike. However, evidence indicates that such programs are more effective at influencing food knowledge and preferences than actual food choices. Such finding may occur because school gardens insufficient...

Integrated home garden interventions combine training in gardening practices with education about nutrition knowledge. Such interventions have been shown to improve nutrition behaviour in low income countries. However, to date rigorous evidence is lacking for their long-term impact. We test the impact of an integrated home garden intervention on ve...

Despite accounting for only 7 per cent of the world’s population, rural youth account for more than 10 per cent of the world’s conflict-exposed population. In 2016, alone, over 350 million rural youth lived in conflict-affected countries. Despite conflict’s being defined as “development in reverse”, however, we find a general lack of research focus...

Gewaltsamer Konflikt ist eine der hartnäckigsten Bedrohungen des Lebensunterhalts und der Nahrungssicherheit von Individuen weltweit. Trotz einer wachsenden Literatur, die die Ursachen und Folgen von Konflikten untersucht, bestehen nach wie vor erhebliche Verständnislücken, die zum Teil auf einen Mangel an qualitativ hochwertigen Konfliktereignisda...

Motivated by the lack of literature linking actual to perceived relative deprivation, this paper assesses the role of visibility in the deprivation of goods and assets vis-à-vis income behind perceptions of relative deprivation. We rely on household survey data that includes unique information on reported perceived deprivation with a pre-specified...

Bone mineral density (BMD) and fracture incidence vary greatly worldwide. The data, if any, on clinical and densitometric characteristics of patients with hip fractures from the Middle East are scarce. The objective of the study was to define risk estimates from clinical and densitometric variables and the impact of database selection on such estim...