How do education resources respond to the quality of local governance in Africa?

Abstract

We empirically investigate the extent to which weak local governance such as corruption, lack of effectiveness, and responsiveness in local government offices in Africa affects the likelihood that citizens experience educational resource challenges in their local public schools. We consider the challenges of lack of textbooks, poor school facilities, expensive school fees, teacher absenteeism, overcrowded classrooms, and poor teaching quality. Our perception-based indicators of local governance are measured at the regional/provincial level, the smallest geographical location in our pooled Afrobarometer data set across 33 African countries. We find that local government officials' corrupt behaviors and ineffectiveness increase the local inhabitants' probability of experiencing challenges in their local public schools, even after controlling for government expenditure on education. The cross-region analysis with instrumental variables reports that a one-point increase in the percentage of citizens who perceived their local government officials as corrupt yields an increase that ranges between 0.4 and 0.9 in the percentage of people who face poor human or physical school resources in their local public schools. These values range between 0.2 and 0.4 for a one-point percentage increase in the measure of local government ineffectiveness.