Poverty and Applied Micro Seminar Series

Pitfalls of Participatory Programs:

Evidence from Randomized Experiments in Education in India

Development projects are pursuing diverse strategies of community participation to make public services work for poor people. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools, into associations or committees and gives them powers over resource allocation, monitoring and management of school performance. In a baseline survey we found that people were not aware of the existence of these institutions of participation and their potential for improving education. We experimented with three different interventions to encourage participation by providing information, and training community members in new testing and teaching tools to build their capacity to monitor and improve the quality of education. We find that these interventions had no impact on participation in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in public schools. However, we do find large impact on activity outside public schools-- local youths volunteered to be trained in the new teaching tool offerred to the community in one of the interventions, and held "reading camps" for illiterate children. Children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. This kind of citizen action could have been taken to improve the public education system, under specific provisions within existing institutions for community participation. Yet, we have no evidence of community-based committees supporting volunteer teachers in their reading camps, or attempting to mainstream the pedagogical tool in the public school. 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. As such, these results provide grounds for tempering enthusiasm for community participation as a general solution to problems of public service delivery, and for investing in rigorous evaluations to identify effective models for participatory action.

Copies of the paper can be obtained from Yasmin D'Souza: ydsouza@worldbank.org

There will also be copies at the seminar.