across countries over time. It seeks to enhance effective and active monitoring and evaluation of service delivery and to become an instrument of public accountability and good governance in Africa. One of the key objectives of the DSI Index is to help reduce the gap of information between citizens, service providers and the state, which is at the root of poor service delivery performance, rent capture and misappropriation of resources. Ultimately, the purpose of the DSI Index is to help policymakers, citizens, service providers, donors and other stakeholders in enhancing the quality of service provision and ultimately improve development outcomes.

The perspective adopted by the DSI index is that of citizens accessing services and facing potential shortcomings in those services made available to them. The DSI index is thus presented as a Service Delivery Report Card on education and health. It seeks to measure the performance and quality of service delivery as experienced by citizens. However, instead of using citizens’ perception to assess performance it assembles objective and quantitative information from a survey of service delivery units, using modules from Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS), Quantitative Service Delivery Survey (QSDS), Staff Absenteeism Survey (SAS), and Observational studies.<sup>2</sup> The index takes as its starting point the recent literature on how to boost education and health outcomes in developing countries. This literature shows robust evidence that incentives aimed at influencing the choice of effort exerted and the type of individuals attracted to specific tasks at different levels of the service delivery hierarchy, are positively and significantly related to education and health outcomes. In addition, conditional on providers exerting effort and being motivated, increasing resources can have beneficial effects. Therefore, we suggest that the indicators focus predominantly on measures that capture the outcome of efforts and type (broadly defined) both at the frontline service unit and by higher level authorities entrusted with the task of ensuring that schools and clinics are receiving proper support as well as the provision of physical resources to the service delivery unit. This choice also avoids the need to make strong structural assumptions on the link between inputs, behavior, and outcomes. While the data collection effort focuses on frontline providers, the indicators will mirror not only how the service delivery unit is performing but also indicate the efficacy of the whole institutional system in health and education. Importantly, we do not argue that we can measure these incentives directly, but, at best, measure the outcome of the set of incentives and constraints, including various supply constraints that influence performance using micro data.

> 2 PETS trace the flow of public resources from the public budget to the intended final users through the administrative structure, as a means of ascertaining the extent to which the actual spending on services is consistent with the intended outcomes envisaged when budgets are allocated. QSDS examine activities and services at the provider level and the incentives and behavior of various agents in order to assess performance and efficiency of service delivery on the frontline. SAS focuses on the availability of teachers and health practitioners on the frontline in order to identify incentive problems and inefficiencies in resources utilization. An observational study aims at measuring the quality of services, proxied for by the level of effort exerted.