Building State Capacity at Scale: Impacts of Training Local Officials in Indonesia's 75,000 Villages

We propose to evaluate a large-scale training program aiming to build capacity within Indonesia’s village governments. In 2014, the Government of Indonesia passed the Village Law, significantly increasing fiscal resources for the country’s 74,954 rural villages. However, limited administrative capacity constraints villages from translating their fiscal resources into better development outcomes. Village heads and secretaries often lack the ability to implement complex bureaucratic tasks such as managing village accounts or designing effective development projects. To address these constraints, the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs in collaboration with the World Bank will roll out a novel Learning Management System (LMS) that is adaptable to the varied needs of village governments. The LMS combines an e-learning platform with facilitated learning “clinics” at the subdistrict level. The randomized rollout of the LMS will allow for a rigorous evaluation of the program’s impacts on the governing capacity of local leaders as well as village governance, public goods, and development.