Remote schools in developing countries are costly to supervise, resulting in low teacher accountability and poor education outcomes. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of three treatments that introduced teacher incentives based on community monitoring of teacher effort...

Social accountability offers a viable alternative to top-down supervision of service delivery in remote areas when travel cost renders the latter ineffective. However, this bottom-up approach may not be effective when the community has weak authority relative to the service provider. This paper...

Exploiting DHS data from 235 regions in 29 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, we find that the combination of low levels of malnutrition together with dramatically high rates of mortality, encountered in Kenya's Lake Victoria territory, is unique for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the causes...

Even though donor focus on employment has varied through the evolution of international development cooperation, there is nowadays widespread consensus on its overall importance as an overarching development goal. Employment promotion is however a complex task due to different target groups and...

In this paper we examine the impact of mandated reservations for female sarpanchs in the gram panchayats on perceptions of service delivery and women’s democratic participation. Using survey data from the Sangli district, Maharashtra, we find that the availability of basic, public services is...

This article describes how the measurement of the official Indonesian poverty figures has evolved since 1984, when Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), Indonesia's central statistics agency, published its first poverty report. Since then, BPS has on several occasions revised the underlying methodology...