The Delivering Service Indicators seek to provide a set of indices for benchmarking service delivery performance in education and health in Africa in order to track progress in and across countries over time. It seeks to enhance effective and active monitoring of service delivery systems and to...

In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all government primary schools. Analysis of household survey data shows this policy contributed to a shift in demand away from free schools, where net enrollment stagnated after 2003, toward fee-charging private schools, where both enrollment and fee levels...

Financial incentives are a promising HIV prevention strategy. This paper assesses the effect on HIV incidence of a lottery program in Lesotho with low expected payments but a chance to win a high prize conditional on negative test results for sexually transmitted infections. The intervention...

This paper presents the results of two field experiments on local accountability in primary health care in Uganda. Efforts to stimulate beneficiary control, coupled with the provision of report cards on staff performance, resulted in significant improvements in health care delivery and health...

The author studies foreign aid policy within a principal-agent framework. He shows that one reason for foreign aid's poor overall record may be a moral hazard problem that shapes the aid recipient s incentive to undertake structural reform. The model's basic prediction is a two-way relationship:...

Exploiting a unique data set containing information about the estimated bribe payments of Ugandan firms, the authors study the relationship between bribe payments, taxes, and firm growth in Uganda for the period 1995-97. Using industry-location averages to circumvent the potential problem of...

The authors exploit an unusual policy experiment to evaluate the effects of increased public access to information as a tool to reduce capture and corruption of public funds. In the late 1990s, the Ugandan government initiated a newspaper campaign to boost schools'and parents'ability to monitor...

Lack of private investment is a serious policy problem in many developing countries, especially in Africa. Despite recent structural reform and stabilization, the investment response to date has been mixed, even among the strongest reformers. The role of poor infrastructure and deficient public...

This paper analyzes the importance of strengthening the relationship of accountability between health service providers and citizens for improving access to and quality of health care. How this is to be achieved, and whether it works, however, remain open questions. The paper presents a...

Using panel data from a unique survey of public primary schools in Uganda, The authors assess the degree of leakage of public funds in education. The survey data reveal that on average during 1991-95 schools received only 13 percent of the central government's allocation for the schools'nonwage...