Endline impact evaluation : Ghana strengthening accountability mechanisms (GSAM)

to conduct an impact evaluation of USAID’s Ghana Strengthening Accountability Mechanisms (GSAM) program, which aims to increase accountability of local District Assemblies in Ghana. This impact evaluation, a randomized-controlled trial, tests the effect of two distinct efforts to increase accountability and improve service delivery outcomes at the district level. One hundred fifty of Ghana’s districts were matched and randomized into one of three groups: a top-down treatment group that received performance audits conducted by the central government Ghana Audit Service (GAS); a bottom-up treatment group that received civil-society organization (CSO) led scorecard campaigns; and a control group that did not receive either intervention. Through surveys with citizens, local administrators, and local politicians and through a review of administrative data, we find that both CSO and GAS programming have had some important impacts, even as some features of district governance are difficult to change. Across both GAS and CSO programming, GSAM reduces citizen satisfaction with projects and services, a finding largely driven by the districts that receive negative audit reports. This indicates that citizens are correctly attributing bad audit performance to poor-performing District Assemblies. CSO and GAS programming have different effects. GSAM’s bottom-up, citizen-focused, CSO programming has generally had more effect on citizen engagement and the behavior of administrators than top-down GAS programming. At the same time, the top-down GAS programming has had a bigger effect on politicians, who are sensitive to incentives created by centralized party and budget systems, and who have decreased political manipulation of the budget as a result of the intervention. Despite these improvements, there are a number of areas of district project and budget management, including development project completion, that were unaffected by the interventions.