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Can Information Campaigns Spark Local Participation and Improve Outcomes? A Study of Primary Education in Uttar Pradesh, India

Author: A Banerjee and R Banerji
Date: 2006
Size: 38 pages (351 kB)

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Summary

What role can local community participation in basic service delivery play in promoting development outcomes? This World Bank working paper considers the participation of Village Education Committees (VECs) in improving primary education services in Uttar Pradesh, India. It reports findings from a survey of public schools, households and VEC members on the state of education services and the extent of community participation in delivering such services. Findings suggest that local participation might be constrained by lack of information regarding VECs and that substantial apathy exists towards education as an area for public action.

Increasing faith in the effectiveness of local participation in improving development outcomes has led policymakers to create new institutions for participation. Such institutions act as a ‘voice’ for the people and facilitating ‘bottom-up’, ‘demand-driven’ initiatives. One such set of institutions are VECs in India. VECs consist of village government leaders, parents and teachers. They are seen as crucial to the governments’ drive to universalise elementary education. VECs are envisioned as the mechanisms through which funds for education services will flow to the village and planning and implementation will be coordinated. However, a survey of users and stakeholders of the VECs found that:

• Parents do not know what a VEC is, let alone its roles and responsibilities, sometimes even when they are supposed to be members of it.
• VEC members are unaware of even key roles they are empowered to play in education services. For example, only nine percent of headmasters realize that they are responsible for hiring additional teachers at local level to address school overcrowding.
• Public participation in improving education is negligible, and correspondingly, people’s ranking of education on a list of village priorities is low.
  

  Large numbers of children in the villages have not yet acquired basic competency in reading, writing and arithmetic.

• Parents, teachers and VEC members seem not to be fully aware of the scale of the problem and seem not to have given much thought to the role of public agencies in improving education outcomes.

In response to the survey’s findings, three grassroots information and advocacy campaigns have been experimentally implemented:

• To facilitate collective public action in education, specific communication methods have been used. These involve bringing local government leaders, head teachers and villagers together in meetings and encouraging them to share information themselves.
• Evaluating the impact of these interventions will generate understanding as to what it takes to create demand for public action and participation in education services, and how long it can be sustained.

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Source: Banerjee, A., et al., 2006, 'Can Information Campaigns Spark Local Participation and Improve Outcomes? A Study of Primary Education in Uttar Pradesh, India', World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3967, World Bank, Washington