Religion and educational mobility in Africa

London Business School and the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development congratulate Professor Elias Papaioannou and his academic colleagues for the publication of ‘Religion and educational mobility in Africa’.

In this study, which has appeared in the scientific journal, Nature, the authors of the study, who include Brown University’s Stelios Michalopoulos, economist and data scientist, Sebastian Hohmann, and the late Alberto Alesina, formerly the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, examine the educational progress across faiths throughout postcolonial Africa, home to some of the world’s largest Christian and Muslim communities.

The authors construct comprehensive religion-specific measures of intergenerational mobility in education using census data from 2,286 districts in 21 countries and document the following. First, Christians have better mobility outcomes than Traditionalists and Muslims. Second, differences in intergenerational mobility between Christians and Muslims persist among those residing in the same district, in households with comparable economic and family backgrounds. Third, although Muslims benefit as much as Christians when they move early in life to high-mobility regions, they are less likely to do so.

Their low internal mobility accentuates the educational deficit, as Muslims reside on average in areas that are less urbanized and more remote with limited infrastructure. Fourth, the Christian–Muslim gap is most prominent in areas with large Muslim communities, where the latter also register the lowest emigration rates. As African governments and international organizations invest heavily in educational programmes, our findings highlight the need to understand better the private and social returns to schooling across faiths in religiously segregated communities and to carefully think about religious inequalities in the take-up of educational policies.