Conflict sensitivity in development assistance can serve not only to decrease levels of violent conflict or the potential for violent conflict, but also to increase the effectiveness of the assistance. Development assistance without conflict sensitivity can inadvertently encourage conflict, and end up doing more harm than good.

Since the main objective of development is to eliminate poverty, this section focuses primarily on the interaction between poverty and conflict, and seeks to demonstrate how politically informed poverty reduction and conflict prevention policies can effectively reinforce each other.

Violent conflicts lead to poverty, particularly where protracted and associated with the collapse of state institutions. Beyond their direct consequences (eg military and civilian deaths, displacement and disablement of populations), conflicts have long-term political, economic, environmental and social costs. These include:

• erosion of political institutions
• reduced state capacity to provide basic social services
• destruction of production base
• capital flight
• loss of food production (conflict-related annual agricultural production losses are estimated at 12% across Africa throughout the 1990s⁶)
• destruction or depletion of natural resources
• disruption of social networks.