From colonialism to developing countries: surveys and educational reform in British Tropical Africa, 1910-1990

During the first years of the twentieth century, Christian missionaries tried to improve their efforts to bring the message of the Gospel to areas such as British Tropical Africa. The process stemmed from the World Missionary Conference in 1910 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where conference organisers used the then popular method of social surveys to determine the content of the conference. They continued to use surveys to determine the best ways to decide what the missionaries should do to improve their efforts in colonial areas. After the First World War, they applied for financial support to conduct surveys to determine how best to shape education in British colonial Africa. They thought their intentions were praiseworthy. The period of conquest had ended, and the British government and the missionaries expressed the desire to improve the lives of the indigenous peoples. This paper will explore three important questions. First, what benefits did they expect to receive from the surveys and how did the missionaries construct their surveys? Second, did the surveys enable the missionaries and the colonial officials to accumulate objective evidence on which they could make reasonable policy decisions? Third, did the surveys reveal the changes that were likely to affect local conditions?