Power to the People: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment on Community-Based Monitoring in Uganda

Martina Björkman and Jakob Svensson
Additional contact information
Martina Björkman: IGIER, Bocconi University, and CEPR.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009, vol. 124, issue 2, pages 735-769

Abstract: This paper presents a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized nongovernmental organizations encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities are more involved in monitoring the provider, and the health workers appear to exert higher effort to serve the community. We document large increases in utilization and improved health outcomes-reduced child mortality and increased child weight-that compare favorably to some of the more successful community-based intervention trials reported in the medical literature. (c) 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (9) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.2.735 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:qjecon:v:124:y:2009:i:2:p:735-769

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://mitpress.mit. ... me.tcl?issn=00335533

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is edited by Robert J. Barro, Edward L. Glaeser and Lawrence F. Katz

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from MIT Press
Series data maintained by Karie Kirkpatrick ().