Decentralizing education expenditures: primary school community grants in Niger

Last registered on March 14, 2016

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Decentralizing education expenditures: primary school community grants in Niger
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0000394
Initial registration date
March 14, 2016

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
March 14, 2016, 6:04 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Sciences Po

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Sciences Po, Department of Economics

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2007-06-01
End date
2012-07-20
Secondary IDs
Abstract
Decentralizing school management has been a common strategy to increase school quality. This study implies that strategies to improve school quality through parents participation should take levels of community capacity into account. We test the short-term responses to a grant to school committee in a context where parents have low authority and little experience managing funds. We find that parents supplemented the grant with their own inputs and increased their participation in school management. Enrollment at the lowest grades and school resources improved. However, teacher were absent more, and there was no impact on test scores.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Beasley, Elizabeth and Elise Huillery. 2016. "Decentralizing education expenditures: primary school community grants in Niger." AEA RCT Registry. March 14. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.394-1.0
Former Citation
Beasley, Elizabeth and Elise Huillery. 2016. "Decentralizing education expenditures: primary school community grants in Niger." AEA RCT Registry. March 14. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/394/history/7262
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
In collaboration with the Niger Ministry of Education and the World Bank, used a randomized evaluation to measure the impact of the grants on community participation and how the impact varies by community characteristics. One thousand schools in the regions of Tahoua and Zinder were randomly selected into treatment and comparison groups. The 500 schools in the treatment group each received an annual lump sum based on the number of classrooms in the school, with an average of US$209 per school, or US$1.83 per student. All 500 schools in the treatment group received a general letter informing them of the grant program and its objectives, and the grant amount allocated to their school. It also included general guidelines on the use of the grants, but the specific project to be supported by the grants was left open to the schools.
Intervention Start Date
2007-08-01
Intervention End Date
2009-03-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
- parents' involvement and responsibility
- cooperation between school stakeholders
- accountability
- school spendings
- school quality: infrastructure, enrollment, teacher attendance, test scores
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
For parent participation in school, the paper uses indices of parent contributions (e.g. school fees), involvement (e.g. going to meetings), responsibility (e.g. in charge of supplies), and teacher oversight (e.g. monitoring teacher attendance).

School management is measured by two indices, accountability (e.g. keeping records) and cooperation (e.g. reported conflicts)

Total spending is decomposed across eight possible spending categories (infrastructure, supplies and textbooks, pupil educational support (e.g. remedial courses), pupil health, teacher support (e.g. housing), COGES expenses (e.g. travel to regional meetings), school festivals and playground, and investments in agriculture)

School quality is measured by :
- Four indices: infrastructure (e.g. number of desks), materials (e.g. textbooks), health resources (e.g. first aid kit), and teacher effort (e.g. teacher attendance).
- Besides, we use scores to tests independently administered by the researchers as well as the annual administrative censuses which report the number of candidates for the national end-of-primary school exam and the number who passed.
- Finally, participation in education is measured by the number of dropouts reported by the school to our surveyors at the April/May 2008 questionnaire on the one hand, and the change in enrollment from fall 2007 to fall 2008 reported to the Ministry of Education in the annual administrative censuses on the other hand.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Low population density, vast distances, and limited transportation, information, and communications infrastructure makes supervision of primary schools by the central government very costly, and the transmission of timely, local information to the central authorities for planning purposes is challenging. To address this problem, in 2006, the Ministry of Education introduced school committees (Committees de Gestion Scolaire, or COGES) in all primary schools. These school committees were designed to involve parents and community members in the school to improve accountability and management. To spur communities to take a more active role in the management of schools, the Ministry of Education also introduced a pilot project that distributed yearly cash grants to the school.

Researchers collected administrative data from each primary school, using the annual school census administered by the Ministry of Education. The census includes data on enrollment, teacher characteristics, school facilities and resources, and community characteristics. To supplement the administrative data, a detailed school survey was administered in 2008 to collect information on school infrastructure and resources, pupil enrollment and attendance, school improvement plan, school committee functioning and membership, and school activities. It also asked detailed questions about the level of education and personal wealth of the school committee members.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
randomization done in office by a computer
Randomization Unit
School
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
1,000 schools
Sample size: planned number of observations
10 students per class, 3 classes per school, 1,000 schools = 30,000 students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
500 schools control, 500 schools treatment
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
IRB Approval Date
IRB Approval Number

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
February 28, 2009, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
Yes
Data Collection Completion Date
February 28, 2009, 12:00 +00:00
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)
814 schools
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?
No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations
814 schools
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms
498 out of the 500 schools assigned to treatment were actually treated, while 499 out of the 500 schools assigned to the control group complied with their status (i.e. one control school received a grant by mistake).
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Abstract
Giving communities power over school management and spending decisions has been a favored strategy to increase school quality, but its effectiveness may be limited by weak capacity and low authority. We examine the short-term responses of a grant to school committees in a context of low authority and capacity, and find that overall, parents increased participation and responsibility, but these efforts did not improve quality. Enrollment at the lowest grades increased and school resources improved, but teacher absenteeism increased, and there was no impact on test scores. We examine heterogeneous impacts, and provide a model of school quality explaining the results and other results in the literature. The findings of this paper imply that strategies to improve quality by empowering parents should take levels of community authority and capacity into account: even when communities are willing to work to improve their schools, they may not be able to do so.
Citation
Beasley, Elizabeth, and Elise Huillery. “Willing but Unable: Short-Term Experimental Evidence on Parent Empowerment and School Quality.” Working Paper, January 2015.

Reports & Other Materials