Information and Public Service Provision: Experimental Evidence from School WASH Services in Bangladesh

The intervention we propose to evaluate is the Annotated Water Integrity Scan (AWIS). AWIS is a participatory approach to information gathering and dissemination designed to evaluate integrity, defined here as a set of practices that impede corruption and promote respect for the rule of law. AWIS is also specifically designed to identify priority steps for improvement. AWIS is scalable, replicable, and adaptable to a wide range of contexts: in this case, the provision of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) services in schools. AWIS was developed by the Water Integrity Network (WIN) and has been adapted and applied in countries including Benin, India, Uganda, and Guatemala.

The AWIS intervention consists of three stages: a policy review; a survey by NGO personnel; and a stakeholder workshop. The workshop is the cornerstone of the process and itself consists of three stages: 1) Stakeholders, including students, parents, school staff and local government administrators, anonymously score processes on transparency, accountability and participation indicators. 2) Participants are invited to openly discuss and defend all scores, high and low, regardless of their own position. Based on the outcomes of the discussion, the scores are jointly adjusted and aggregated, until they are agreed upon. 3) Participants identify priority risks and action areas. The AWIS process makes it possible to discuss integrity without antagonizing stakeholders and helps raise awareness on contrasting points of view and unexpected risks. The assessment provides a basis to advocate for undertaking steps to strengthen institutional and governance mechanisms.

In this study, we implement AWIS with respect to WASH service provision in high schools in rural Bangladesh.

2018-08-15

2018-11-15

a) Indicators of WASH provision, developed from national guidelines and international recommendations (e.g. UNICEF, 2012) such as the presence of water and soap for hand washing.

b) School attendance (overall and disaggregated by gender).

c) Exam results (overall and disaggregated by gender).

d) Latrine use (overall and disaggregated by gender in case of latrine facilities separated by gender).

a) Indicators of WASH provision: We carry out an extensive and comprehensive data collection for each WASH facility in the school. We include indicators on cleanliness and maintenance of the facility, the presence of basic items for hygienic practices, and adoption of MHM standards. Information are collected by enumerators based on their own independent observation of each facility, and supported by a detailed series of pictures.

b) School attendance: We obtain attendance data for two calendar months preceding the survey (chosen to exclude religious festivals or major examinations) and for the month when the survey takes place from attendance books. In addition, we obtain audit data by own head-count (disaggregated by gender) performed by our enumerators at the beginning of the school visit. Attendance data are collected for one randomly selected classroom per grade.

c) Exam results: We collect test results on the most recent standardized national exams for grade 8 and grade 10 from official school records.

d) Latrine use: We use event loggers to obtain data in a discrete and non-intrusive manner. Whenever latrines have doors, we use magnetic sensors that record opening and closure of latrine doors. Alternatively, we use motion sensors. Data on latrine use are collected for a maximum of 4 latrines per school, randomly selected.

We conduct our study in 60 schools, selected by our local partner DORP and equally distributed in two Upazilas, Bhola and Ramgati.

The intervention we evaluate consists in the participation of school stakeholders (students, parents, school staff and local government administrators) in the AWIS workshop. During the workshop, stakeholders discuss the current status of WASH facilities in the school and agree on an action plan for future improvements and developments.
Before the implementation of the AWIS workshop we collected baseline data in all schools. We plan to collect follow-up data in all schools between 6 months and 1 year after the implementation of the intervention.

We randomly assign schools to receive the invitation to the AWIS workshop by public lottery, stratified by Upazila.

The randomization is performed at school level.

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60 schools

60 schools. We obtain attendance data for a maximum of 5 classes per school, and latrine use data for a maximum of 4 latrines per school. We obtain WASH provision indicators for all water and sanitation facilities in the school, whose numbers are unknown to us in advance. Whenever possible, we will exploit this increased sample size in the analysis, although we will conduct inference accounting for assignment to treatment at the school level.

Control schools: 30.
Treated schools: 30.

Our most conservative power calculations exploit only the variation across schools and follow Burlig et al. (2017) to account for the panel data structure, and serial autocorrelation. With significance level 10% and power 80%; assuming that school fixed effects and time fixed effects explain in total 70% of the variation in the outcome variables; and further assuming a value of 0.05 times the variance for the serial correlation parameter, the minimum detectable effect (MDEs) is 0.5 s.d. While these MDEs correspond to relatively large effects, most of our analyses will be powered to detect smaller effects as a result of obtaining, for most of the outcomes of interest, multiple observations within each school at each survey.

Pre-Analysis Plan

Can transparency interventions improve WASH service provision? We use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of a transparency intervention, a deliberative multi-stakeholder workshop initiated with a community scorecard exercise, in schools in rural Bangladesh. To measure impacts, we combine survey data, direct observations, and administrative data. The intervention leads to moderate but consistent improvements in knowledge of WASH standards and practices, and institutions for WASH service management, but does not improve school WASH service provision or change WASH facility use patterns. Drawing on rich descriptive data, we suggest several reasons why the intervention we evaluate did not improve WASH service outcomes and propose ways to improve the design of future interventions.

Allakulov, U., Cocciolo, S., Das, B., Habib, M. A., Rambjer, L., & Tompsett, A. (2023). Transparency, governance, and water and sanitation: Experimental evidence from schools in rural Bangladesh. Journal of Development Economics, 163, 103082.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103082