announcers representing different ethnic groups. Unobserved, commune characteristics evidently subject community radio projects to the same political risks of local elite capture and clientelist and ethnic politics as community-based projects in other sectors. Since these could plausibly affect education outcomes, we do not exploit inter-commune differences in community radio access to identify radio effects on patterns of bed net distribution. Instead, all estimates control for commune fixed effects and identify the influence of community radio based solely on intra-commune variation in radio access.

Unobserved cultural and economic characteristics of villages may lead some villages to enjoy both more access to within-commune community radios and to receive more free bed nets. To address such concerns, we used maps showing the location of villages, radio towers, and major road networks to restrict the sample frame to 210 villages that were approximately equidistant to (equally remote from) radio towers and roads inside the commune.<sup>13</sup> Complementing the fragmentation of the Benin radio market, the sampling frame yields variation in within-commune radio access driven by station location and transmission conditions that are exogenous to the sampled villages.

However, most of the variation in access to radio signals is explained by differences in access to out-of-commune radio stations. The average household has access to .63 within-commune community radio stations, with a standard deviation of .51. It has access to 1.78 out-of-commune stations, with a standard deviation of 1.45. Most of the access variation in the sample is therefore due to variation in signals from neighboring communes.

This, however, does not attenuate the ability of our tests to pick up the traditional accountability story in the literature: those households with more access to out-of-commune stations are better-informed about the existence of bed net distribution programs, the pricing of bed nets and the need for bed nets, all critical ingredients in accountability. Out-of-commune stations do not inform them about the compliance of their local officials with centrally-mandated rules regarding pricing, but their personal observation of local official behavior makes this irrelevant.

If radio access is the product of exogenous factors and if the sampling strategy was successful, villages with more and less community radio access within a commune should be indistinguishable. In particular, if observable characteristics of villages do not differ systematically, unobservable village characteristics that could cause a spurious relationship between radio access and bed-nets distribution are also likely to be the same in villages with more and less radio access. In fact, Table 2 shows that radio access is uncorrelated with a wide range of observable village characteristics.

> 13 Unfortunately, no data were available on the precise GPS locations of stations and villages to directly control for this in our analysis. The best we could do was rely on pictorial maps provided by our local consultants to ―eyeball‖ neighboring villages that were located equally distant from radio towers. However, as we discuss below, we are able to verify that our sampled villages exhibited no correlation between radio access and observable characteristics of location that could independently impact education outcomes.

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