Borders That Divide: Education and Religion in Ghana and Togo Since Colonial Times

Abstract

The partition of German Togoland after World War I provides a natural experiment to test the impact of British and French colonization. Using data of recruits to the Ghanaian colonial army 1908-1955, we find that literacy and religious affiliation diverge at the border between the parts of Togoland under British and French control as early as in the 1920s. We partly attribute this to policies towards missionary schools. The divergence is only visible in the South where educational and evangelization efforts were strong. Contemporary survey data show that border effects that began in colonial times still persist today.hen African countries gained independence, former British colonies had on average higher school enrollment rates than former French colonies (Benavot and Riddle 1988;Brown 2000;Grier 1999). A significant educational disparity still exists today. In 2000 former British colonies enrolled 70 percent of their school-age population in primary schools, 15 percent more than former French colonies (Garnier and Schafer 2006). Many scholars argue that the persistent difference in education is a legacy of the colonial past whereby countries inherited and more or less followed the very distinct education models that their colonizers implanted (Bolt and Bezemer

African polygamy: Past and present

“…In this section, I use a regression discontinuity design to test whether polygamy rates break at the borders in my sample. Other border studies for Africa (Berger, 2009;Bubb, 2009;Cogneau et al, 2010;Cogneau and Moradi, 2011) have found that government investments such as education and health have effects that change discontinuously across national borders. Similarly, imported institutions such as local government can have long-lasting border effects.…”

The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in sub-Saharan Africa

“…Focusing on literacy and religious affiliation, Cogneau and Moradi (2014) find that colonial border effects still persist today. At a more refined level, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2014) shed light on the long-term growth consequences of subnational institutions.…”

Legal Origins and Female HIV

“…They use the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization and demonstrate how artificially drawn borders by colonists partitioned a significant number of ethnic groups into different countries. See also Cogneau, Mesplé-Somps, and Spielvogel (2015) and Cogneau and Moradi (2014).…”