Schooling norms and the persistence of inequality: Evidence from the Muslim-Christian education gap in Malawi

• In Event: The politics of education in developing countries

Proposal

In many African countries, there exists an education gap between Christians and Muslims, where Muslims have less formal schooling on average than Christians. The magnitude of this gap is increasing with the share of the local population that is Muslim. Previous work has shown that this latter phenomenon is not fully explained by poverty, beliefs about the returns to education, displacement of formal schooling by religious schooling, or access/distance to school. In this paper, I conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment and survey designed to measure the social benefits and costs of schooling among Christian and Muslim communities in Malawi. Specifically, I measure social norms about the appropriateness of completing various levels of school, and how these norms differ across religious groups in Muslim minority and Muslim majority areas. To do so, respondents are monetarily incentivized to guess, among a religiously homogeneous/heterogeneous session of community members, the modal response of the degree of social acceptability of completing various levels of school. I show, using census data, administrative data, and a lab-in-the-field experiment, that social returns to schooling – social norms about the appropriateness of schooling – explain differences in education across Muslim minority and majority communities better than beliefs about returns to education or access to school.

Author

• Melina Platas, New York University, Abu Dhabi