Pervasive bullying and its negative consequence on standardized tests of Reading, Science and Mathematics – A comparative analysis of three countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

School bullying is a common yet unfortunate occurrence associated with several hindering outcomes for children’s educational and psychological development. Using a nationally representative data sample of 26,467 students from three sub-Saharan African countries of Ghana, Botswana and South African, we investigate the prevalence of bullying and its ramification on students’ academic performance. The data reveals that more than 50% of the survey participants were bullied regularly in school. We employ a Propensity Score based matching technique to estimate the effect of bullying of their performance on standardized reading, mathematics and science tests. The results of our estimation reveal statistically significant decreases due to bullying in scores on all three types of standardized evaluations between 3% to 8% for all three countries.