Community Empowerment and Teacher Performance Pay: Education in Indonesia

The quality in the delivery of public services such as health care provision by doctors, nurses and medical staff and the provision of education by teachers and principals varies substantially across and within countries. Due to a multitude of reasons public services do often not function as expected due to a lack of accountability and inventice structures. As a result health workers and teachers in developing countries are frequently missing from school despite receiving salaries.
To address the lack of incentives, bottom-up accountability structures can be a powerful tool in order to make health workers and teachers responsible to delivering better services. While bottom-up/social accountability structures are in place and have been introduced around the world, the evidence on whether these structures can lead to improvements in public service delivery are very mixed.
Our contribution to the international research agenda comes from rigiorously evaluating various innovative alternative community empowerment interventions that can have a long-lasting impact on improving children's education outcomes.