Effects of Africa’s Colonial and Slave Trade History on the Nexus of Education and Economic Development

Abstract

This dissertation investigates two major issues. First, the effect of Africa’s history (colonialism, slavery, and slave trade) (CS) on investments in education and the development of educational institutions is ascertained. This is achieved by determining the effect of Africa’s CS history on investments in education and examining the role of Africa’s CS history in explaining contemporary education. This has been done using instrumental variables. Secondly, the effect of Africa’s CS history on the relationship between educational development and economic development is investigated by using Africa’s CS history and the ranking of colonial and slavery factors as intervening effects on the relationship between educational development and economic development, as well as on the relationship between investments in education and economic development. Panel data analysis together with time series analysis have been used to address this objective. First, the causality confidence is improved when railroads and disease prevalence are used as instruments for the European population which addresses any endogeneity concerns going forward. Mostly because the distribution of colonial roads and disease prevalence dictated the location where Europeans settled to inevitably invest and develop. Moreover, the main observation is that precolonial and colonial educational development partly explains the significant differences that intergenerational mobility has had on contemporary development, which is connected to deep evolutionary traits, more specifically to slavery intensity as well as the type and policies of colonisation that was developed. Second, time series estimates varies similarly by empire on education investments and higher education enrolment, which implies that educational development is still currently highly neocolonial and neoliberal. Similarly, traces of the aftereffects of the severity of slavery and slave trade together with ethnic fractionalization and missions amongst other colonial factors strongly and persistently continue to influence the current relationship between economic and educational development. In more details, findings have established a disconnection between educational and economic development which has been attributed to neocolonialism and neoliberalism as their involvement disrupts the development of higher education institutions and causes it to be regarded as a commodity rather than a public good. xi A possible recommendation is that African governments should not allow their higher education institutions to be used as a marketplace for the production of instrumental and academic knowledge which is irrelevant to a nation’s development but only beneficial to the global economy. This then can be done by incorporating a nation’s development plan in both private and public higher education institution as well as on external funding policies. In the autoregression results, the development of education is highly disconnected from economic development in regions that were severely affected by slavery, Islam dominancy, European settlers and ethnic fractionalization which can still be largely mapped to colonial violence as caused by slavery and slave trade. Hence, a possible implication for these regions could be for policy makers to consider improving their policies in such a way that they are less repressive because policies that are entirely repressive tend to be counter-productive if development initiatives are not in place to aid in determining the drivers of violence further assisting in improving the education of youth, socio-economic inequalities, including skills by creating community awareness and education programs.