Social Accountability and Service Delivery : Experimental Evidence from Uganda
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? This paper looks at whether providing so...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/836191526913938694/Social-accountability-and-service-delivery-experimental-evidence-from-Uganda http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29859 |
| Summary: | 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? This
paper looks at whether providing social accountability
training and information on project performance can lead to
improvements in local development projects. It finds 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. The impacts appear
to come from community members increasing their monitoring
of local projects, making more complaints to local and
central officials, and cooperating more. The paper also
finds modest improvements in people's trust in the
central government. The study is unique in its size and
integration in a national program. The results suggest that
government-led, large-scale social accountability programs
can strengthen communities' ability to improve service delivery. |
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