Information , Voice and Action : Can Communities Change Education Outcomes ? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Pakistan

Can governments improve functioning of school management committees by creating community engagement spaces to deliberate on education issues? The question falls within the broader decentralization literature where devolved service delivery in education is expected to result in better mapping of community identified needs (allocative efficiency), and improved resource-use (technical efficiency) at the school level. In a large-scale field experiment in rural Sindh, Pakistan, we pilot four interventions to strengthen linkages between the community, parents, local bodies (school committees) and head teachers. We use village-level randomization to estimate treatment effects on the availability and use of school-level resources. Treated schools are approximately twice as likely to have an additional teacher deployed post-treatment, as compared to schools in the control group. School infrastructure improvements are concentrated in the treatment group where community dialogue was sustained through text-messages, and new school committees were elected to act on community-identified needs. On the demand-side we find evidence of increase in enrollment, particularly in the early-grade intake of boys, concentrated in communities where dialogue was sustained through text-messages. Overall, we do not find any robust short-term gains in student test scores in the treatment group, for both English and Mathematics. JEL Codes: D78, I21, I28, H75, O15 NEUDC program area and sub-area: Education (Education Delivery) ∗We thank the Government of Sindh’s Education and Literacy Department and the Reform Support Unit, in particular, Dr. Fazlullah Pechoho, Saba Mushtaq, Faisal Ahmed Uqaili, Dr. Hamzo Khan Tagar, Muhammad Nasim Qureshi and Sania Khursheed, for extensive collaboration and assistance; the World Bank’s intervention design team, in particular Priyanka Pandey, Lorenza De Icaza and, Mariam Nusrat Adil; the Weitek Group for field implementation; Amar Fateen and Saindad Joyo for implementation support; RCons for school surveys; Ilagno Patchamutho, Rachid Benmessaoud, Amit Dar, Keiko Miwa, Umbreen Arif and Margo Hoftijzer for their encouragement and support for this project. Most importantly, we thank Robbie Dean, Cameron Friday, Ali Abbas, Zunaira Mughal, Amn Nasir and Tooba Akhtar for providing outstanding research assistance at various stages of the project. The authors thank Alaka Hola, Juliea M. Trias, Deon Filmer, Owen Ozier, Achim Schmillen and David Evans for helpful discussions and insightful comments. We thank discussant and participants at the 2016 RISE Annual Conference at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided for this project by the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), the Education Sector Development Program and the World Bank. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors or the countries they represent. ¥ Corresponding author: Salman Asim, Economist, World Bank; email: sasim@worldbank.org; Dhushyanth Raju, Senior Economist World Bank; Nazmul Chaudhury, Lead Economist and Adviser Strategy, Results and Risks, World Bank, and Amina Riaz, Consultant and Graduate student at University of Chicago.