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Social accountability and service delivery: Experimental evidence from Uganda

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  • Fiala, Nathan
  • Premand, Patrick

Abstract

Corruption and mismanagement of public resources can affect the quality of government services and undermine growth. Can citizens in poor communities be empowered to demand better-quality public investments? We look at whether providing social accountability training and information on project performance can lead to improvements in local development projects. The program we study is unique in its size and integration in a national program. We find that offering communities a combination of training and information on project quality leads to significant improvements in household welfare. However, providing either social accountability training or project quality information by itself has no welfare effect. These results are concentrated in areas that are reported by local officials as more corrupt or mismanaged, suggesting local agents have significant information about where corruption and mismanagement is worse. We show evidence that the impacts come in part from community members increasing their monitoring of local projects, making more complaints to local and central officials and increasing cooperation. We also find modest improvements in people's trust in the central government. The results suggest that government-led, large-scale social accountability programs can strengthen communities' ability to address corruption and mismanagement as well as improve services.

Suggested Citation

  • Fiala, Nathan & Premand, Patrick, 2018. "Social accountability and service delivery: Experimental evidence from Uganda," Ruhr Economic Papers 752, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:rwirep:752
    DOI: 10.4419/86788874
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    Cited by:

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    2. Shuguang Jiang & Marie Claire Villeval, 2022. "Dishonesty in Developing Countries -What Can We Learn From Experiments?," Working Papers hal-03899654, HAL.
    3. Dan Levy, 2019. "Can Transparency and Accountability Programs Improve Health? Experimental Evidence from Indonesia and Tanzania," CID Working Papers 352, Center for International Development at Harvard University.
    4. Afridi, Farzana & Dhillon, Amrita & Chaudhuri, Arka Roy & Kaur, Dashleen, 2020. "Efficacy of Top down audits and Community Monitoring," OSF Preprints akpdy, Center for Open Science.
    5. Kahsay, Goytom Abraha & Bulte, Erwin, 2021. "Internal versus top-down monitoring in community resource management: Experimental evidence from Ethiopia," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 189(C), pages 111-131.
    6. Igor Francetic & Günther Fink & Fabrizio Tediosi, 2021. "Impact of social accountability monitoring on health facility performance: Evidence from Tanzania," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(4), pages 766-785, April.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    social accountability; community training; scorecards; corruption; service delivery;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development

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