Community involvement and socioeconomic achievement gap in 14 sub-Saharan African countries

As a global trend, sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have increasingly received reforms from international organizations (IOs) to improve learning achievements for marginalized groups by promoting community involvement in school governance. The idea is to mobilize local resources and lessen the ‘burden’ on the central government. This paper examines the association between community involvement in school affairs and inequality in achievement by socioeconomic status (SES) using data from the Program for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC) 2019 survey of 14 Francophone SSA countries. Results suggest that community involvement is not significantly associated with the SES math achievement gap and does not substantially explain the gap. Contrarily, school resources substantially explain achievement gaps between lower- and higher-SES students. Our findings remain similar in several specifications, including using different inequality measures. We argue that involving local communities may not fully address the challenges of insufficient school resources and individual-level poverty in SSA.