Social Accountability and Service Delivery: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
Corruption and mismanagement of public resources can affect the quality of government services and undermine growth. How can citizens in poor communities be empowered to demand better-quality public investments? We look at whether providing social accountability skills and information on project performance can lead to improvements in local development projects supported by a large national program. We find that offering communities training improves project output. The combination of training and information on project quality leads to significant and large improvements in household assets, while providing either social accountability training or project quality information by itself has no effects on household assets. We explore mechanisms and show that the impacts come in part from community members increasing their monitoring of local projects, making more complaints to local and central officials and increasing cooperation. We also find modest improvements in people’s trust in the central government. The results suggest that government-led, large-scale social accountability programs can make development more effective and improve citizens' welfare.