Historical Missionary Activity, Schooling, and the Reversal of Fortunes: Evidence from Nigeria

This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission stations in Nigeria, we find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to greater missionary activity have higher levels of schooling. This effect is robust to omitted heterogeneity, ethnicity fixed effects, and reverse causation. We find inter-generational factors and the persistence of early advantages in educational infrastructure to be key channels through which the effect has persisted. Consistent with theory, the effect of missions on current schooling is larger for population subgroups that have historically suffered disadvantages in access to education

One Voice, Multiple Tongues: Dialoguing with Boko Haram

Using official documents from the government and Boko Haram and other fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria, this study examines the prognosis of the dialogue option between the Boko Haram fundamentalist Islamist group and the federal government of Nigeria. To achieve this, the study compares the stated and inferential motives of Boko Haram with Nigeria\u27s pluralist nature and argues that insofar as Boko Haram remains an internal dialogue within Islam, especially in northern Nigeria, and an offshoot of a process derived from socioeconomic and political imbalances in contemporary Nigeria, the government could dialogue with Boko Haram on the second issue but would breach its own constitution and legal codes on the first