Highlights
We assess the impact of a transparency & accountability program on health outcomes.
We use randomized controlled trials involving 400 villages across Indonesia and Tanzania.
On average, no evidence of a treatment effect on maternal and newborn healthcare.
The causal paths from planning actions to tangibly improving healthcare were complex.
Overall, few communities were able to traverse these complex causal paths.
and the rest of the team at SurveyMETER in Indonesia. We would also like to thank our partner J-PAL Southeast Asia, especially Lina Marliani, Eki Ramadhan, and Hector Salazar Salame. We also thank scholars Iqra Anugrah, Megan Cogburn, Mohmed Yunus Rafiq, and Kankan Xie for their ethnographic studies of several communities who participated in the program. We gratefully acknowledge the members of the T4D advisory committee: Yamini Aiyar, Jessica Cohen, Jonathan Fox, Anuradha Joshi, Dan Posner, and Bill Savedoff. Finally, our most important debt is to the thousands of community members in Indonesia and Tanzania who volunteered their time and energy to participate in the programs we evaluate here. The pre-analysis plan for this paper was registered at the AEA RCT registry (#655) prior to the endline data collection.
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