So fresh and so clean: Urban community engagement to keep streets trash-free and improve the functioning and sustainability of drainage infrastructure in peri-urban Dakar

Two interventions are proposed for evaluation as part of this study.

First, Operation Quartier Propre (OQP) will engage local Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to work within their communities to improve and maintain the cleanliness of public spaces and drainage infrastructure. CBOs will receive an initial endowment in the form of standard cleaning equipment provided to them through the municipality. After six months, the progress of the CBOs toward achieving an agreed set of targets will be evaluated against a small set of standardized benchmarks, and where acceptable progress has been made the CBO will be rewarded with a plaque or a banner that will be displayed in a public place signaling their involvement and success in maintaining the cleanliness of their community. At the end of the intervention period (after 1 year) CBOs that have fulfilled all criteria will receive in-kind incentives in the form of t-shirts, cooking materials and plastic chairs, and the right to keep the formerly distributed initial endowment (the endowment and incentives were developed through consultations with the implementing agency and their contracted Social Facilitators, which are larger NGOs operating in PROGEP project areas). In addition, a public ceremony will be held to formally acknowledge and reward the CBOs that have been successful.

The second intervention consists of community micro-projects (Projets d’Investissement Communautaire, or PICs), which are investments of US$10-70k applied for and implemented by community-based organizations with a high-level of implementation support and supervision from the Municipal Development Agency of Dakar (PROGEP implementing agency) and the project’s Social Facilitators. PICs are intended to improve the value of areas surrounding water retention ponds through construction e.g. of walk paths, fishing areas, picnic tables, sports infrastructure, etc.; securing unbuildable lands; improving waste management around drainage infrastructure; and decreasing possible negative externalities of drainage infrastructure, such as malaria transmission.

This registry focuses on the experimental evaluation of the OQP intervention. A non-experimental evaluation of the PICs has been proposed and is contingent on the eventual implementation scale of this intervention.

2015-06-04

2016-07-31

Household-level final outcomes include loss and damage to property, income, and health and education of household members. Intermediate outcomes include knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to flood prevention and risk mitigation. To measure the latter, we intend to use incentivized decision activities (behavioral games) in the endline survey.

CBO-level outcomes include improved knowledge of and engagement in flood prevention and risk mitigation.

Community level outcomes include improved cleanliness of public spaces and improved functioning of drainage systems and other public infrastructure. Ultimately, this is expected to lead to improved infrastructure sustainability and return on investment, and increase community resilience to flooding.

OQP will be evaluated using a cluster randomized trial with household-level outcomes. Treatment is applied at the cluster (quartier) level which is the unit-of-randomization. Of the 395 quartiers in the PROGEP’s intervention area, 160 have been randomly selected to participate in the OQP pilot and impact evaluation. Of these, 80 will be randomly assigned to the treatment and 80 to the control group. Quartiers are grouped according to a set of criteria drawn up by the social facilitators, who have intimate knowledge of the study areas, on the basis of geography and social ties between quartiers. While this grouping is not ideal from a study design perspective, from an implementation perspective it is absolutely critical. Random assignment is stratified by group, i.e. within each grouping approximately half of quartiers are randomly assigned to treatment and half to the control group.

Randomization is done through public lottery for reasons of transparency and local buy-in.

The proposed unit of randomization is the quartier, or neighborhood. These are located around constructed and planned drainage infrastructures (canals and water retention ponds).

Yes

160 quartiers

2,400 households (15 households per quartier)

80 quartiers treatment (1,200 households), 80 quartiers control (1,200 households).