Senegal Behavior Change Campaign & Solar Lights Evaluation

Last registered on May 15, 2024
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Senegal Behavior Change Campaign & Solar Lights Evaluation
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0000977
Initial registration date
December 09, 2015

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
December 09, 2015, 9:41 AM EST

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

Last updated
May 15, 2024, 4:47 AM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country
Senegal
Region
Thiès, Diourbel, and Louga

Primary Investigator

Name
Arndt Reichert
Affiliation
Leibniz University Hannover/ The World Bank
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Victor Orozco
PI Affiliation
The World Bank
PI Name
Aidan Coville
PI Affiliation
The world Bank

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2016-02-01
End date
2017-11-30
Keywords
Environment & Energy
Additional Keywords
Solar lights, energy, rural electrification, mass media randomized field experiment, education, health
JEL code(s)
I38, L82, N77, J24
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to over 600 million people without access to electricity. Small-scale solar photovoltaic (pico-PV) products have emerged as a way to provide access to basic energy services, particularly modern lighting, and are assumed to be associated with development benefits such as household savings, increased productivity, better education, and reduced indoor air pollution. In Senegal, Lighting Africa in combination with Total, will implement a behavior change campaign relying mainly on radio clip broadcasting as well as community outreach print materials.
The proposed impact evaluation will assess two elements of the mass media campaign, comparing narrative clips broadcasted at a national radio station with the same radio intervention in combination with community outreach materials regarding per capita costs and effects on awareness, understanding, and demand of solar lights. It is based on an innovative experimental design that achieves village-level randomization without needing to control radio airwaves. Moreover, this is the first experimental mass media study related to energy and climate-change. If the mass media campaigns (the primary focus of this impact evaluation) increase purchases, the evaluation team will aim to measure the behavior change and development impacts of these products.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Coville, Aidan, Victor Orozco and Arndt Reichert. 2024. "Senegal Behavior Change Campaign & Solar Lights Evaluation." AEA RCT Registry. May 15. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.977-4.0
Former Citation
Coville, Aidan, Victor Orozco and Arndt Reichert. 2024. "Senegal Behavior Change Campaign & Solar Lights Evaluation." AEA RCT Registry. May 15. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/977/history/221328
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
This IE will examine two mass media campaigns in three Sengalese regions (Thiès, Diourbel, and Louga) that aim to make people switch from climate-damaging energy sources to small-scale solar lanterns. These lanterns provide bright white light at a wide angle, illuminating an entire room. They can feature different brightness settings, providing up to 16 hours of light (100 hours on the bed light setting). They can charge mobile phones and come with a USB port allowing smart phones to be charged.


Intervention (Hidden)
The radio mass media campaign consists of a series of 5-10 education entertainment radio spots of about 30 seconds broadcasted at a national radio station each day during the course of one month. The format of the short radio spots is a narrative with background rural noises and characters that face similar challenges (e.g. poor or no lighting at night) as the people in the study area. The spots concentrate on reliability, health, quality, alternative uses, cost, and operations and maintenance of solar lanterns. They will be broadcasted every day during one popular morning and evening show at a random time of the show for one month.
The community outreach materials address the same themes as the radio clips. Posters and flyers will be distributed by a local communications firm at frequented locations and places where people are gathering such as the main road, local shop, and taxi stops. Flyers will also be pinned to doors of houses in reasonable proximity (e.g., radius of 15 minutes walking distance) to the village center. Compared to the average size of the villages in our study area of approximately 800 inhabitants, the flyers alone will reach about 25 percent of the village population.
Intervention Start Date
2016-04-01
Intervention End Date
2016-05-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Investment, Demand, Awareness, Understanding, Productive time use, ALRI, Fuel replacement
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The study will follow a cluster randomized controlled trial with 2 treatment arms (T1 and T2) compared to a control (C).

Treatment 1: Radio
We will follow the approach taken by Berg and Zia (2013) in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the radio spots. Households within each of the 150 participating villages will be encouraged to tune into one of two similar radio stations (for example, channels X and Y ). T1 and T2 villages will be encouraged to listen to channel X which will be broadcasting the radio campaign while C villages will be encouraged to listen to channel Y which will not broadcast any LA material. Each household will receive a lottery ticket if they participate in the baseline interview coupled with the information that (i) there will be two daily radio lotteries during one popular morning and evening show, such as the hit parade, at a random time of the show for one month, (ii) their cell-phone number will be what the radio station uses to verify the authenticity of their lottery ticket, (iii) they may receive a cash award of US$50 if their lottery number is called, and (iv) awarded individuals need to activate mobile-phone based payment of the reward by texting to a specific number at no cost. During these lotteries, a radio host will randomly draw one lottery number out of a list of recruited participants

Treatment 2: Community campaign
Villages randomly selected to be part of T2 will have community outreach materials distributed in addition to the radio campaign.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
randomization done in office by a computer
Randomization Unit
Villages and households
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
50 clusters per treatment arms
Sample size: planned number of observations
20-100 housholds per village
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
3000-15000 households in a total of 15o villages
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
IRB Solutions
IRB Approval Date
2016-03-04
IRB Approval Number
Protocol #2016/03/4
Analysis Plan

Analysis Plan Documents

Pre-Analysis Plan

MD5: 3c648ab75d2894325c500fd4963d787e

SHA1: fc380dc61b62abfb9a51780d23bde742f1686b99

Uploaded At: May 15, 2024

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
May 31, 2016, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
No
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
No
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Abstract
This paper provides an explanation for why many information campaigns fail to affect decision-making. The authors experimentally show that a large information intervention about a profitable and climate-friendly household investment had limited effects if it only provided generic data. In contrast, it caused households to make new investments when it followed a campaign strategy designed to minimize information processing costs. This finding is consistent with a model of selective attention, where individuals prioritize
information believed to be valuable after accounting for
the costs of attending to the data that arise due to limited mental energy and time. The paper studies a range of
possible mechanisms and finds corroborative evidence of selective attention as an inhibitor to learning.
Citation
Coville, A., Orozco-Olvera, V., & Reichert, A. (2019). Paying attention to profitable investments: experimental evidence from renewable energy markets. The World Bank.
URL
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/935421568313537951/pdf/Paying-Attention-to-Profitable-Investments-Experimental-Evidence-from-Renewable-Energy-Markets.pdf

Reports & Other Materials