Can Information Campaigns Raise Awareness and Local Participation in Primary Education?

This 28-page paper reports first-stage results from a collaborative study. The collaboration - between Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative (Pratham), Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty
Action Lab at [Massachusetts Insitute of Technology] MIT (J-PAL), and the World Bank - is on community participation in education in a rural district of Uttar Pradesh, India.

From the abstract:
"There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local
communities in basic service delivery can promote better outcomes. A central plank of
public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of
Village Education Committees (VECs), consisting of village government leaders, parents,
and teachers. This paper reports findings from a survey in a rural district in Uttar Pradesh.
Rural households, parents, teachers and VEC members were surveyed on the status of
education services and the extent of community participation in the public delivery of
education services. Children’s basic ability to read, to write and to do simple arithmetic
operations was also assessed.

We find that most parents do not know that a VEC exists,
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; 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 acquired basic competencies of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Yet, 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 local action in improving outcomes."



In response, this team of authors designed a set of
information and advocacy campaigns to explore whether
local participation can increase - a project to be evaluated by future research.
Among their intervention strategies with the goal of local participation in education services for direct improvement in learning outcomes are these:

• Begin a campaign urging people to come together as a village to discuss problems in education and explore what they can do about it in the context of an invitation to volunteers to
  make their village a
  “Reading Village".
• Create a platform for information-specific education provisions and resources for VECs using facilitated hamlet-level small group meetings and one village-level large group meeting to discuss education issues.
• Create village report cards on children’s learning using local participation to assess children's reading, writing, and arithmetic levels, and follow with discussions of these findings in small group and big group meetings.
• Implement village volunteer-based action on improving reading through demonstration to and training of literate village volunteers who want to take action to improve reading outcomes, beginning with demonstrations done by the intervention team on how accelerated learning can take place, and followed by training sessions and on-going monitoring of volunteer-based classes.
• Use the assessment exercise “village report
  cards on learning" to involve and mobilise people.

Implementation of these interventions took place in 2006. Follow-up surveys are being implemented to gather data to compare to the baseline survey.