Suchergebnisse

Community-driven development programs are a popular model for service delivery and socioeconomic development, especially in countries reeling from civil strife. Despite their popularity, the evidence on their impact is mixed at best. Most studies thus far are based on data collected during, or shortly after, program implementation. Community-driven development's theory of change, however, allows for a longer time frame for program exposure to produce impact. This study examines the longer term impact of a randomized community-driven development program implemented in 1,250 villages in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo between 2007 and 2012. The study team returned to these villages in 2015, eight years after the onset of the program. The study finds evidence of the physical endurance of infrastructure built by the program. However, it finds no evidence that the program had an impact on other dimensions of service provision, health, education, economic welfare, women's empowerment, governance, and social cohesion. These findings suggest that, although community-driven development programs may effectively deliver public infrastructure, longer term impacts on economic development and social transformation appear to be limited.

The literature documents a positive association between democracy and health, and studies supporting this claim have largely relied on cross-country panel analyses. In many developing countries, however, local traditional leaders at the micro-level play a key role in individuals' daily lives while the influence of the national government is largely negligible. In response, this study revisits the relationship between democracy and health using micro-level household data from 816 randomly selected villages in Eastern Congo. We find little or no evidence that health outcomes are better in villages which are governed by elected leaders compared to villages where leaders are not elected. Our data suggest that efforts to improve health outcomes in this setting may need to focus on issues such as gender discrimination and education.

Poor-quality data about conflict events can hinder humanitarian responses and bias academic research. There is increasing recognition of the role that new information technologies can play in producing more reliable data faster. We piloted a novel data-gathering system in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which villagers in a set of randomly selected communities report on events in real time via short message service. We first describe the data and assess its reliability. We then examine the usefulness of such "crowdseeded" data in two ways. First, we implement a downstream experiment on aid and conflict and find evidence that aid can lead to fewer conflict events. Second, we examine conflict diffusion in Eastern Congo and find evidence that key dynamics operate at very micro levels. Both applications highlight the benefit of collecting conflict data via cell phones in real time.