Colonial origins and quality of education evidence from Cameroon

Yasmine Bekkouche and Yannick Dupraz
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Yasmine Bekkouche: ECARES - European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics - ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles

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Abstract: We revisit the question of colonial legacies in education by focusing on quality rather than quantity. We study Cameroon, a country where a Francophone education system with French colonial origins coexists with an Anglophone system with British colonial origins. This allows us to investigate the impact of different teaching practices on students' test scores. We find that pupils schooled in the Francophone system perform better in mathematics in Grade 5, with test scores higher by two thirds of a standard deviation. Thanks to detailed school survey data, we are able to account for a wide array of inputs of the education production function, such as the economic and social conditions of students, the material conditions of the schools and classrooms, as well as some information on the teachers' practices and pedagogical culture. We find that Francophone schools have better classroom equipment and that Francophone teachers use more vertical teaching methods, but that these differences cannot explain why Francophone students perform better in mathematics. In the end, we cannot pin down the exact mechanism behind our result.

Keywords: Education; School quality; Colonial legacies; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-04135636
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Published in World Development, 2023, 170, pp.106245. ⟨10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106245⟩

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Journal Article: Colonial origins and quality of education evidence from cameroon (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04135636

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106245

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