This document summarizes a field experiment conducted in 126 Angolan schools to isolate the impacts of information and collective action components of community-based monitoring interventions. The experiment included: (1) an "Information only" treatment that provided school performance information to parents through home visits, (2) a "Collective Action only" treatment that facilitated discussion at parent meetings without new information, and (3) a "Combined" treatment with home visits and parent meetings including new information. The treatments differentially impacted parental participation. Providing information increased individual involvement like helping with homework, while meetings without new information increased participation in school accountability systems. The combined treatment impacted both individual and collective participation and led to some school management improvements, though no impacts on

1. Information and Collective Action in Angolan Schools:
Inside the Black Box of Community-based Monitoring
Vincenzo Di Maro*
Stefan Leeffers† Danila Serra‡ Pedro C. Vicente§
Abstract
Community-based monitoring interventions usually rely on meetings where
community members are given information about the relative performance of their
local service delivery facility (e.g. school, health center), and they are encouraged
to discuss problems and come up with action plans. We report results from a field
experiment in 126 Angolan schools where we isolate the impacts of the
information and the collective action components of community-based monitoring
interventions. Specifically, we conducted: (i) an Information only treatment where
we provided relevant information to parents through door-to-door visits, (ii) a
Collective Action only treatment where we held parents’ meetings to facilitate
discussion without providing any outside information, and (iii) a Combined
treatment where we conducted door to door visits and held parents’ meetings that
started with the dissemination of information on the school’s relative performance.
We document differential impacts of the treatments on various dimensions of
parental participation. Providing information through door to door visits impacted
parents’ individual involvement at home through, for instance, an increased
likelihood of helping with homework and of setting regular wake-up and sleep
times, and at school, through an increased likelihood of meeting teachers to discuss
the child’s performance. On the other hand, fostering collective action through
parents’ meetings led to increased parental participation in formal school
accountability systems, such as school boards. Such increased participation is
observed even when no new exogenous information is provided to parents, as in
our Collective Action only treatment. In our setting, the combination of the two
treatments impacted both individual and collective parental participation and
generated improvements in school management. While we do not find evidence of
treatment effects on either teacher or student performance, we suspect that more
time is needed for the observed changes in parental involvement to translate into
changes in education outcomes.
JEL Codes: C93, D04, D78, I21, O15
Keywords: Community-based monitoring, information, collective action, accountability, field
experiment, Angola, Africa.
*
Development Research Group, The World Bank, vdimaro@worldbank.org.
†
Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, stefan.leeffers@novasbe.pt.
‡
Department of Economics, Texas A&M University, dserra@tamu.edu.
§
Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, pedro.vicente@novasbe.pt.