Community Driven Development in Sierra Leone

Two hundred thirty-six villages from two ethnically and politically distinct districts were randomly allocated into a treatment group or a comparison group. Villages in the treatment group were regularly visited by a GoBifo facilitator, who helped community members create or revamp Village Development Committees (VDCs), set up bank accounts for the VDCs, establish transparent budgeting practices, and create village development plans that included specifics on how GoBifo grants would be used. The participation and inclusion of marginalized groups was central to this process - for example, each social group (women, youth, and adult men) came up with their own development plan, and these plans were then combined into a single unified vision. Women were often established as treasurer of the VDC and served as co-signatories on all project finances. A series of block grants totaling US$4,667 per community were given to implement local public goods and skills training projects that were identified in the village development plans.

Household surveys, which covered participation in local decision-making, attitudes to minorities, and engagement in collective action, as well as demographic and socioeconomic information, were collected in late 2005 and again in mid-2009, along with village-level focus group discussions. In addition, three structured community activities (SCAs) were conducted in late 2009, shortly after GoBifo activities had ended, to capture any persistent impacts on collective action, participation of minorities, and elite capture. The SCAs were designed to measure how communities responded to concrete, real-world situations in three areas where GoBifo had sought to change behavior: (i) raising funds in response to a matching grant opportunity; (ii) making a community decision between two comparable alternatives; and (iii) allocating and managing an asset that was provided for free.

2006-01-01

2009-10-01

Project Implementation and Local Infrastructure Investment: The GoBifo project successfully established the village-level organizations and tools to manage development projects in nearly all cases. The distribution of project benefits within communities was equitable, leakage of project resources minimal, and minority participation high.

GoBifo villages had a larger stock of higher quality local public goods, such as a functioning primary school or community grain-drying floor, than comparison areas. There was also more market activity in treatment communities, including the presence of more traders and items for sale, suggesting short-run economic gains.

Institutional Change and Collective Action: There is no evidence that the program led to fundamental changes in local institutions or descision-making. Despite the fact that many women in treatment villages participated in GoBifo decisions, they were no more likely to voice an opinion in community meetings after the project ended or to play a leadership role in other areas. Similarly, the establishment of a democratically elected village development committee that carried out multiple projects did not lead treatment villages to be any more successful at raising funds in response to a later matching grant opportunity. Lastly, there were no program impacts on elite capture, although levels of capture were low in the research communities (at least as measured by the third SCA).

This analysis draws on three main data sources: household surveys from late 2005 (baseline) and mid-2009 (follow-up); village-level focus group discussions held in 2005 and 2009; and three novel SCAs conducted in late 2009 shortly after GoBifo activities had ended. The SCAs were introduced with the initial follow-up survey in May 2009 and then followed up in an unannounced visit five months later. The research team and enumerators were operationally separate from GoBifo staff at all stages of the project.

We ran 500 computer randomizations and saved all resulting assignments that generated no statistically significant differences (at 95% confidence) between treatment and control groups in terms of the total number of households per village and the distance to the nearest road. The randomization process for the island communities of Bonthe Town (which comprise 3.4 per cent of our sample) was conducted manually by a public lottery since there was no community list from the Statistics Sierra Leone (SSL) 2004 Population and Housing Census available for the town to use in the computerised process.

Village level, stratifying on ward.

Yes

236 villages

2,382 households

118 GoBifo treatment and 118 control villages

Online appendix with PAP

Despite their importance, there is limited evidence on how institutions can
be strengthened. Evaluating the effects of specific reforms is complicated by the
lack of exogenous variation in institutions, the difficulty of measuring institutional
performance, and the temptation to ‘‘cherry pick’’ estimates from among
the large number of indicators required to capture this multifaceted subject. We
evaluate one attempt to make local institutions more democratic and egalitarian
by imposing participation requirements for marginalized groups (including
women) and test for learning-by-doing effects. We exploit the random assignment
of a governance program in Sierra Leone, develop innovative real-world
outcome measures, and use a preanalysis plan (PAP) to bind our hands against
data mining. The intervention studied is a ‘‘community-driven development’’
program, which has become a popular strategy for foreign aid donors. We
find positive short-run effects on local public goods and economic outcomes,
but no evidence for sustained impacts on collective action, decision making,
or the involvement of marginalized groups, suggesting that the intervention
did not durably reshape local institutions. We discuss the practical trade-offs
faced in implementing a PAP and show how in its absence we could have
generated two divergent, equally erroneous interpretations of program impacts
on institutions.

Casey, Katherine, Rachel Glennerster, and Edward Miguel. 2012. "Reshaping Institutions: Evidence on Aid Impacts Using a Pre-Analysis Plan." Quarterly Journal of Economics 127(4): 1755-1812.

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/publication/reshaping-institutions-evidence-aid-impacts-using-pre-analysis-plan

The World Bank and other donors dedicate sizeable portions of their portfolios to
community-driven development (CDD) projects, yet until recently there has been little
rigorous evidence regarding the efficacy of this approach. By emphasising local participation
in and control over project implementation, CDD has come to be seen as an efficient and
accountable mechanism for delivering local public goods. However, CDD aims to achieve
much more than this. Through intensive, long-term facilitation, CDD aims to strengthen
local institutions, enable them to become more democratic and inclusive of marginalised
groups and enhance the capacity of communities to engage in collective action.

This evaluation tests the extent to which CDD has achieved these goals in Sierra Leone and
has several key features. First, by randomly assigning project participation across a large
pool of eligible communities, the experimental design provides rigorous evidence regarding
the causal effects of the programme. Second, the research team followed communities over
four years, allowing it to capture changes in behaviour that are likely to evolve only slowly
over time. Third, by using a rich set of survey techniques, as well as creating a series of
real-world decisions and opportunities to act collectively through 'structured community
activities' (SCAs), we approach these important but elusive concepts of social dynamics
from a variety of angles. Fourth, to avoid data mining, the research and project teams
jointly agreed to a set of hypothesised areas of impact in 2005 before the project began,
and then in 2009 the research team defined exactly which outcome measures would be
used to evaluate success before analysing any of the post-project data. Finally, our
relatively large and diverse sample enables us to make precise statements about even
subtle changes. We use this framework to estimate (i) the direct impacts of the project
during its implementation, as well as (ii) potential spillovers onto other non-project realms
of local affairs and (iii) the lingering effects that persisted after the project itself had ended.

More specifically, one might expect a range of impacts from any development intervention,
ordered by the reach of their influence and the difficulty of their attainment. The first stage
is actually to implement projects in communities, which GoBifo accomplished quite
successfully (see outcome Family A in Table 1 below). The programme achieved what it
intended: it established village-level structures and tools to plan and manage development
projects; it provided communities with financing and guidance to implement small-scale
projects; and it created links between these processes and local government institutions.
Moreover, the contributions to and benefits from the sponsored projects were distributed
broadly and equitably, and the leakage of project resources appears to be minimal. The
extreme poverty, recent recovery from civil war and endemic struggles against corruption in
Sierra Leone make these achievements impressive.

Casey, Katherine, Rachel Glennerster, and Edward Miguel. "The GoBifo Project Evaluation Report: Assessing the Impacts of Community Driven Development in Sierra Leone." 3ie Impact Evaluation Report, October 2013.

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/publication/gobifo-project-evaluation-report-assessing-impacts-community-driven-development-sierra-l