« Back to Resources

Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

This resource was published as the World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4584 in March 2008 as part of the Impact Evaluation Series No. 21.

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. 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 committees and gives these powers over resource allocation, monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey this paper finds that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education.

The paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries’ participation: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. The authors 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, the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had large impact on activity outside public schools — local youths volunteered to be trained, 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.

Download
Share:      
Uploaded on: Nov 25, 2015
Last Updated: Dec 04, 2015
Year Published: 2010


Resource Tags

Resource Type: Impact Evidence Issues: Children's Rights, Community Organizing, Education, Governance, Accountability & Transparency Tool Type: Policy Papers / Briefs, Training Resources & Popular Education Method: Improving Governance, Accountability and Transparency, Promoting Citizens' Participation in Governance Languages: English Regions: South Asia Nature of Impact: Citizen Action & Participation, Impact on Education, Legal Knowledge and Skills Scale of Intervention/Impact: 1,000 to 10,000 people Institutions Engaged: Service Delivery Agencies Evaluation Method: Randomized Control Trials