EDI Impact Evaluations

This impact evaluation was undertaken on behalf of the   Millennium Challenge Account Tanzania (MCA-T) , part of the   Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in collaboration with Social Impact, with the aim of assessing water sector projects in Dar es Salaam and Morogoro. These projects are intended to improve the supply and quality of water in the two regions, and the survey aimed to measure the impact of the water works on several outcomes of interest, such as water consumption, time spent fetching water, sources of water (domestic/commercial), water expenditures, water quality at point of consumption, incidence of water-borne disease (particularly incidence of diarrhoea among children under five years), investments in physical and human capital, time allocated within the household to productive activities, and household income.

About 5000 households were sampled across Morogoro and Dar es Salaam and an extensive baseline survey was conducted spanning both the dry and wet seasons. The Morogoro sample had an additional short survey conducted prior to the longer baseline survey. All households were sampled to continue, after the baseline, for another 3 rounds of phone surveys. This implies up to 5 rounds of data for close to half the sample. Frequent data collection is useful in order to obtain more accurate measures of water availability (as water availability varies significantly over time). Water samples were collected and tested at the household, community and system levels. Rainfall data was collected from weather stations as rainfall affects water availability. Monthly reports were also obtained from the public utilities, to provide supplementary data. Finally, the survey included a qualitative component in both the survey regions, with focus group discussions and structured interviews being conducted among a range of relevant water users and suppliers, such as female water users in low-income areas, water-related business owners, various types of water sellers, community managed water source operators, and district health and education officers.

The project will exploit differences in treatment exposure across households to measure the effects of the programme. Because treatment exposure will not be random Generalised Propensity Score Matching (GPSM) and Difference-in-differences (DD) regressions will be used to control for observables that jointly determine treatment and outcomes. A secondary identification strategy is to use distance to the distribution network as an instrument for treatment.

Twaweza is collaborating with J-PAL to design a randomized control trial to evaluate and understand the effects of two interventions at 350 randomly selected public primary schools across 10 districts in Tanzania. The interventions include a school grant as well as teacher incentives, which aim to improve the channelling of resources to public primary schools for quality improvement of public education, and the learning outcomes of primary school students respectively. The baseline survey in early 2013 collected school and teacher information as well as student and household information from randomly selected classes, teachers, and students from standard 1 to 3. Participating schools were then be randomly allocated to one of four study arms, and the interventions were be rolled out in the treatment groups. In May/June and September 2013, two rounds of monitoring visits to schools collected information on teacher attendance and activities within schools. An end-line survey during late 2013 again collected teacher and school data, as well as information from students and households interviewed and tested during baseline.

EDI continued to work with TWAWEZA and IPA/JPAL on these experiments throughout 2014 and we are just embarking on the experiments for 2015 with them.

This was a randomised control trial of a virtual business incubator project. A survey of 832 women, a random selection of whom have been given specialised business training through a virtual business incubator project. This project, implemented on behalf of the World Bank, aimed to establish whether lack of business skills is a constraint to development and emancipation of female entrepreneurs and, if so, whether specialised training can make a difference.

This RCT, conducted on behalf of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), the Havard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm) was conducted over 2 years and comprised 7 rounds of retail audits visiting over 400 Accredited Drug Dispensing Outlets (ADDOs), 5 rounds of exit interviews at these ADDOs and 3 rounds of socio-economic surveys in 1,000 households

A Randomised Impact Evaluation This 5 year panel survey, commissioned by the World Bank and TASAF, follows a treatment and comparison groups of vulnerable people, who participate in a community driven development project. Impacts will be identified through the staggered introduction of the project in 50 of the 100 sampled communities. This project involves a complicated listing exercise in which a short questionnaire is administered to everyone in the village (around 50,000 households in total) to assess the targetting efficiency of the programme as well as to stratify the sample within the village and oversample vulnerable groups.