While the study of politics in Africa has long focused on ethnicity as the predominant cleavage affecting political and economic outcomes, large inequalities in socio- economic status exist across religious groups, including among co-ethnics. In particular, Muslims, who comprise one-third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa and are the fastest growing Muslim population in the world, are far less educated on average than Christians. This paper documents this widespread inequality and provides an empirical investigation of the correlates of the Muslim-Christian education gap at the country level. There is a strong and non-linear relationship between percentage Muslim of a country and the education gap. The gap increases sharply among both men and women as the Muslim population grows from being a very small minority to a larger minority, after which the relationship is flat. The patterns are consistent with a long-term effect of the initial distribution of colonial investments in formal education being concentrated in non-Muslim areas, with large Muslims minorities more easily excluded from colonial investments than small Muslim minorities. Wealthier countries tend to have larger education gaps, while the percentage of Muslims living in urban areas is negatively correlated with the education gap. The findings point toward new directions for the study of African politics, the politics of education, and the persistence of inequality across identity groups.

Religion is increasingly recognized as an important determinant of political and economic outcomes, from political participation to innovation. This paper identifies a new and related empirical relationship between religious identity and human capital in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. Using census and survey data from eleven African countries, I find that Muslims have lower educational attainment than Christians, and educational attainment is lowest where Muslims live as a local majority, a phenomenon I refer to as Muslim majority disadvantage. This pattern is found for men and women, adults and children. What explains Muslim majority disadvantage? Using administrative and survey data from the case of Malawi, I show that physical access to schools is lower in Muslim majority areas, and that Muslims living as a majority tend to be poorer than others. However, a large residual Muslim majority effect remains after taking into account both physical access and poverty. Using data from a new household survey with embedded experiments conducted in two districts in Malawi, one Muslim minority and one majority, I investigate a set of possible mechanisms that may explain the residual effect of Muslim majority status, controlling for access. I find similar levels of demand for education across Muslim minority areas, and no evidence that religious education is displacing formal education. Muslims living as a majority have more religiously homogeneous social networks, and lower access to formal sector jobs through these networks. The evidence is consistent with a “ethnic capital” explanation for the persistence of educational inequality in Muslim majority areas.