Can Student Body Diversity Foster Inter-ethnic Trust, Tolerance, and National Identification Prioritization? The Role of Friendship in Kenya

Education is thought to be an essential tool for building social cohesion in an ethnically diverse society. This paper evaluates the effect of exposure to a more diverse student body on trust, tolerance, and patriotism in one country where the government has made explicit efforts to use schooling to foster social cohesion: Kenya. In the wake of electoral violence in the 2007 elections, Kenya’s government expanded the number of ‘national schools’, schools with required regional diversity quotas, from 18 to 103. We leverage the policy change to compare 984 secondary students in schools that differ in their use of a diversity quota. We measure friendship with outgroup members, trust, tolerance, and national identity. Our findings indicate that national school students are more likely to have inter-ethnic friendships and are associated with a higher prioritization of civic national identity over subnational identities. We find that diverse friendships act as a mediating factor for increased trust and tolerance.