Letting communities take the lead : a cross-country evaluation of social fund performance

Abstract

Social investment funds are an innovative alternative to traditional 'top down' economic development programs. Social funds represent one of the first large-scale attempts to implement a development model that relies on communities taking the lead in defining their investment priorities. The heart of the research effort is the use of rigorous impact evaluation methodologies to compare the outcomes of communities that undertook social fund investments to the outcomes experienced by control or comparison groups that establish the counterfactual state of what will have occurred in the absence of the social fund investment. This report also marks the first cross-country incidence analysis of social fund beneficiaries using household survey data to compare the poverty levels of social fund beneficiaries to national poverty distributions. The research is based on the analysis of data from over 21,000 households surveyed for the purpose of this study and 42,000 households from national household surveys, as well as facilities surveys of over 1,200 schools, health centers, and water and sanitation projects. The results of the research reveal that social funds have met the broad objectives they were designed to address and have made important contributions to improving welfare.