It has been argued that governments elected in open electoral competition will have greater incentives than their authoritarian counterparts to provide primary education for their citizens. The difficulty with testing this hypothesis using cross-country data is that if we observe a positive correlation between electoral competition and primary school attendance, we will not know whether this implies a causal relationship or, alternatively, whether this simply means that other, potentially unobserved, country-level factors produce both democracy and broad education provision. This short paper reports results of an empirical test that attempts to deal with this problem by using individual-level data on education provision and subjective assessments of government performance for African countries. My results show that changes in primary education provision are strongly correlated with assessments of government performance, even when controlling for unobserved country-level factors, and I suggest that this provides partial support for the idea of a causal link between democracy and education provision.