Recruiting and Incentivizing Service Providers: Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone

Abstract: Recruiting and incentivizing service providers is a central challenge for many developing country governments. Research emphasizes the benefits of involving beneficiary communities. However, we do not know whether community monitoring is more or less effective than performance based payment schemes or how these monitoring schemes depend upon personnel recruitment strategies. We collaborate with the Ministries of Health and Agriculture in Sierra Leone in a large field experiment involving Community Animal Health Worker recruitment and accountability in 300 villages . We use a factorial design and randomly assign health workers to community monitoring, and/or a pay-for-performance scheme. We use behavioral measures to quantify service provision. We find that both community monitoring and performance based payment increase service provision. In a subset of villages we also manipulate worker selection mechanisms. While selection changes the pool of worker candidates, it does not change the level of service provision.