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Power to the People: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment on Community-based Monitoring in Uganda

This paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May 2009, presents a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized nongovernmental organizations encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities are more involved in monitoring the provider, and the health workers appear to exert higher effort to serve the community. We document large increases in utilization and improved health outcomes—reduced child mortality and increased child weight—that compare favorably to some of the more successful community-based intervention trials re-
ported in the medical literature.

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Uploaded on: Nov 25, 2015
Last Updated: Dec 04, 2015
Year Published: 2009


Resource Tags

Resource Type: Impact Evidence Issues: Children's Rights, Community Organizing, Education, Governance, Accountability & Transparency Tool Type: Journal Articles & Books, Training Resources & Popular Education Method: Improving Governance, Accountability and Transparency, Promoting Citizens' Participation in Governance Languages: English Regions: Sub-Saharan Africa 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