social learning or a demonstration effect. While the ELA program can influence the girls to talk about business and finance with their friends from their informal savings group, the reverse causality is equally possible whereby girls are more likely to talk about businesses after forming their savings groups. However, positive correlations between the likelihood of talking about business with fellow girls in their network and having informal savings could suggest social learning. ROSCA being a collective activity,<sup>11</sup> it is almost a necessary condition for girls in such groups to discuss business plans and other topics related to finance.

Figure 1 shows that the girls who reported discussing business issues with their friends are more likely to have savings with a ROSCA compared to the rest. While we see the same pattern in the likelihood of ROSCA participation in all three groups of communities, the difference is much sharper for ‘Club + MF’ villages. We then use discussion of social issues as a type of placebo comparison. Although there is a significant positive correlation between these two measures of networks, we find a weaker correlation between having discussed social issues with their social network and ROSCA participation. As pointed out earlier, this measure does not provide conclusive evidence on social learning, but it provides suggestive evidence of a mechanism by which the provision of formal financial services (microfinance) may have crowded‐in demand for informal financial services.

# **6. Why are the impacts of ELA different between Tanzania and Uganda?**

As we have discussed so far, we find starkly different impacts of the ELA program in Tanzania as compared to a similar intervention by the same NGO in Uganda. It is important to highlight here that it is not unique to find that similar programs show different effects depending on the implementation team.<sup>12</sup> While it is extremely important to understand why these are so different from a generalizability perspective, an attempt to answer this question _ex post_ can be dangerous. After all, these are only two cases of implementing a ‘similar intervention model’ by an NGO that differ in many aspects, including (and certainly not limited to) two different country contexts, different implementation teams, implemented at different levels of scale, with different amounts of resources available. Any combination of these differences could potentially be the underlying factor behind this difference. With this important caveat, we discuss several key factors that seem to be driving these contrasting results. For this, we heavily draw on qualitative research comparing ELA in Uganda and Tanzania as case studies by BRAC’s research and evaluation division (Yam, 2013).

This qualitative process evaluation identifies several weaknesses in the implementation of the program in Tanzania. Discussions of these weaknesses with implementation teams reveal that resource constraints are at the core of the quality of implementation. Unlike in Uganda, where the program was scaled up while the evaluation pilot was underway, there were important resource constraints in Tanzania. The initial delay in project rollout and having to redeploy teams to new sites depleted the program’s ability to implement the interventions according to the original design.

> 11 In a typical ROSCA, group members put in their savings at regular intervals and loans are given out predominantly to group members.

> 12 For example, in an evaluation of scaling up a previously successful contract teachers intervention in Kenyan schools, Bold et al (2013) find different results on impacts of students’ learning by types of implementing agencies (Govt. vs. NGO). This study highlights differences in monitoring and implementation quality being major drivers of different outcomes.

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