基督教传教会的教育遗产:来自刚果民主共和国的证据

This paper investigates the educational legacies of Christian missions established before independence, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, focusing on contemporary disparities in educational content, quality, access, and outcomes. Using georeferenced data from over 20,000 schools and two million students participating in the Examen National d’État (Exetat) between 2016 and 2019, as well as primary data from a phone survey of 624 school directors, we explore how proximity to Catholic and Protestant missions during the colonial period influences educational opportunities today. We find that schools near historical Christian missions offer a broader and higher-quality curriculum, with increased access to study tracks outside the basic Pedagogy section. Students attending these schools are more likely to pass the Exetat and achieve grades qualifying for university admission, although the magnitude of the effect is modest. Observable school-environment and quality characteristics attenuate the Catholic missionary-proximity coefficient by about half, while demand-side patterns point to additional differences in student composition. Our findings reveal that the strong partnership between missions and the colonial state entrenched spatial inequalities in educational access and quality, inequalities that persist to this day.