Tribe or Nation?

Abstract

This paper examines how government policies affect inter-ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania. Despite similar geography and colonial legacies, post-independence governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious "nation-building". The evidence in this paper indicates that the Tanzanian approach has allowed diverse communities in rural western Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in the Kenyan region. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less school funding than homogeneous areas on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero and statistically insignificant. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that, in the long-run, serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions, and suggests that nation-building should take a place on government policy agendas, especially in Africa.