Africa's Skill Tragedy: Does Teachers' Lack of Knowledge Lead to Low Student Performance?

Student performance in Sub-Saharan Africa is tragically low. We study the importance of teacher subject knowledge for student performance in this region using unique international assessment data for sixth-grade students and their teachers. To circumvent bias due to unobserved student heterogeneity, we exploit variation within students across math and reading. We find that teacher subject knowledge has a modest impact on student performance on average. However, this effect is substantially larger for students with access to textbooks, which indicates important complementarities between teacher knowledge and school resources. Results are robust to adding teacher fixed effects and not driven by sorting.