Pitfalls Of Participatory Programs: Evidence From A Randomized Evaluation In Education In India

Abstract

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes both locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools into committees and gives these groups powers over resource allocation, and monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey we found that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. This paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation through these committees: providing infonnation, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. We find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools.However, we do find that the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had a large impact on activity outside public schools -local youths volunteered to be trained to teach, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.

Do They Work? Assessing the Impact of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives in Service Delivery

“…The biggest effect was on teacher presence and effort, whereas the impact on pupil learning was more modest. By contrast, in another RCT study on the impact of information on the ability of communities to engage in accountability mechanisms and subsequent impacts on quality of services in India, Banerjee et al (2010) show that providing information -about the education programme as well as the level of child achievement in literacy and numeracy -had little impact on engagement with the school system or demanding accountability. Rather, when community volunteers were trained to carry out remedial classes outside the classroom, it had a greater impact on children's literacy and numeracy skills.…”

Impact of Literacy Interventions on Reading Skills in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries: A Meta‐Analysis

“…The nature of community involvement as well as quality indicators of community involvement (community buy in; fidelity of implementation) are important factors for results. For instance, Banerjee et al (2010) compared two types of community involvement-(a) training community members on reading assessment so that they know their children's reading status and (b) training on reading instruction strategies-and found no effect of the training on assessment but a positive effect of the training on reading instruction. Furthermore, several studies indicated substantial challenges in parents' and/or students' participation in community sessions such as parent workshops and student reading camps (e.g., Badiable, Guajardo, Fermin, & Robis, 2013;Brown, 2013).…”

“…Interventions also vary in terms of involvement of the community in student learning. The vast majority of interventions target instruction in the school context only, whereas some incorporate community involvement to encourage literacyrelated activities in the children's homes and communities (e.g., Banerjee et al, 2010;Dowd & Friedlander, 2016;Friedlander & Goldenberg, 2016). According to the Ecological Systems Theory, interactions in multiple layers of environment shape human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), and therefore, children's daily interactions in their homes and communities beyond the school setting influence their learning, including literacy skills (Bracken & Fischel, 2008;Senechal, LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998).…”

Electoral incentives to combat mosquito-borne illnesses: Experimental evidence from Brazil

“…Given that politicians' incentives may not be aligned with the goal of improved service delivery, several studies over the past decade have investigated the potential for social accountability: conveying information about government service delivery directly to citizens in the hopes that they will demand better performance from frontline providers (Fox, 2015;World Bank, 2016). Conclusions from this research program have been mixed; one study shows that efforts to facilitate citizen monitoring improve service delivery and health outcomes (Björkman & Svensson, 2009;Björkman Nyqvist, de Walque, & Svensson, 2017), whereas other studies in the area of education have found null effects on citizen engagement, learning outcomes, and teacher effort (Banerjee, Banerji, Duflo, Glennerster, & Khemani, 2010;Lieberman, Posner, & Tsai, 2014). A general conclusion is that the effective exercise of social accountability is often inhibited by barriers to collective action, a low sense of efficacy, and a lack of knowledge of concrete steps that citizens can take to act upon information (Banerjee et al, 2010;Buntaine, Daniels, & Devlin, 2018;Fox, 2015;Lieberman et al, 2014).…”