Variations in non-state service provision are a relatively understudied dimension of wellbeing inequality in sub-Saharan Africa. This study from Madagascar documents long-term associations between nineteenth-century missionary education and the availability of private schools today.
The article exploits an original data set with unusually detailed information on missionary education and contemporary local private school supply. The results indicate high levels of persistence in non-state schooling at the geographic level. The long tradition of faith-based education appears to contribute to religious differences that overlap only imperfectly with more widely studied ethnic divides.
Key findings:
- Variations in non-state service provision represent a relatively understudied dimension of wellbeing inequality in sub-Saharan Africa. This article has sought to fill this gap by documenting persistence in the provision of non-state services since the precolonial and colonial period. In Madagascar, areas that had more missionary schools in the past continue to have more private schools today. These historical inequalities in private school supply account for most of the differences in current formal education availability, and they are an important determinant of intergroup inequalities in educational outcomes.
- The study’s findings have various implications for the wider debate about the politics of public goods provision in sub-Saharan Africa. At a more general level the article adds to the quickly growing literature on the historical origins of African development. As with other recent studies, the results favour an explanation that links current differences in development outcomes to past investments in school infrastructures, not to the quality of local regulatory frameworks or institutions.
- The focus on private education in this context illustrates a very precise mechanism of educational persistence: The study shows that long-term effects of missionary presence only hold for private education without visible consequences for alternative modalities of school provision in the public sector. The use of regional fixed effects, instrumental variable estimates, and various other robustness checks further strengthens the case that persistence in private school supply is not driven by other locality-specific influences.
- The study produces two more findings that illustrate the importance of considering historical variations in non-state school supply as a relatively independent source of wellbeing inequality in sub-Saharan Africa. First, the results point to surprisingly weak associations between historical private education availability and local economic outcomes. In the case reported here, the estimated relationship between past and present school supply only interacts weakly with controls for historical and contemporary economic conditions. This suggests that the processes that led to persistence in non-state schooling are not systematically associated with the economic development trajectory of a region. This result is consistent with other studies that also show weak correlations between economic and educational outcomes in Madagascar and other sub-Saharan countries (Easterly, 2001; Lloyd & Hewett, 2009; Pritchett, 2001; Wietzke, 2013).
- Second, the study results illustrate that non-state school provision can have relatively autonomous effects on group inequalities in sub-Saharan Africa. In the case considered here, interreligious inequalities associated with non-state schooling overlap only imperfectly with more widely studied ethnic divides. This result corroborates recent research that suggests that group-level differences in African societies can vary quite considerably across alternative dimensions of wellbeing (Posner & Kramon, 2011; Stewart, 2008).
- For the study of intergroup relations, this suggests that future analysis needs to pay more attention to the specific historical and social processes that influence living standards of individual groups. Unitary or one-dimensional models that impose single causal explanations in isolation risk overlooking more complex realities on the ground, and may lead to misguided recommendations on how to address group inequalities in the future.