Outstanding Performance or Reversal of Fortune in Burundi’s Education System?

From the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals, the focus of educational policies recommendations for the Global South has shifted from the quantity to the quality of education. The learning crisis many developing countries face is even more severe in sub-Saharan Africa and exhibits the difficulty of reforming education systems. The political economy of education seems to be a key factor in study education quality. In that regard, Burundi provides an insightful case study: its education system stands as an outlier when it comes to primary school quality and presents a strong geographical heterogeneity. We find that Burundi has experienced a sharp increase in test scores from 2009 to 2014, both in an absolute sense and relative to similar sub-Saharan African countries. We find this increase is mainly due to the performance of the Northern provinces, the region of birth of late President Nkurunziza. Turning to the mechanisms, no other hypothesis has been tested, but our difference in difference analysis reveals that the improved performance of this region cannot be explained by better infrastructure.