The Municipal Administration has the goal of making all cities in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu (TN) "Open Defecation Free." To achieve this goal, there have been deployed a large number of public toilets across cities. These toilets, managed by independent contractors who are provided fixed monthly compensation from the government for operations and maintenance, require effective management if the goal of making TN cities "open defecation free" is to be achieved. Currently, a significant proportion of the existing public toilets are not effectively managed and do not provide the level of quality service expected by users. Under the existing system, the operations and maintenance contractors are provided a fixed compensation based on a contract with the government, to run the public toilet facilities. Users do not pay any fees and as a result, there is little incentive for contractors to deliver better service quality (and thus incentivize more consumers to use toilets). 

The study, in partnership with the Municipal Administration and Water Supply of Tamil Nadu, is aimed at helping the government develop a market driven user-fee based contractual arrangement for public toilets which will motivate operators to maintain effective service quality, while at the same time reduce the government's financial burden. The study design offers operators different levels of user fees bundled with appropriate fixed compensation. This experiment will help the government evaluate whether user fees should be adopted (and if so, at what level), determine the reductions in fixed financial payments to the contractors, and understand the impact on consumer welfare -- with the ultimate goal of increasing consumer use of public toilets. 

Starting in Spring 2018, J-PAL South Asia, in close collaboration with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC), will conduct a full-scale impact evaluation that will inform the privatization of toilet operations and inspections. The research team will independently monitor and inspect approximately 660 toilets, administer detailed surveys, and collect data on toilet service quality, use, user satisfaction, financial sustainability, and savings to the corporation to provide information and recommendations on the effectiveness of tendering and viability of user fees as a model for public toilets. 

In most low-income countries, there are limited opportunities in the formal wage sector and a large share of recently graduated students who are unemployed. There is a knowledge gap in development literature that focuses on which type of business training techniques work best for youth entering the labor market. While there is evidence of the importance of soft skills in labor market success (Heckman et al. 2006), there is little known about what matters for entrepreneurship. Can youth be taught skills that will help them become successful entrepreneurs? If so, which type of skills are most necessary for effective entrepreneurship? Traditional “hard” business skills or “soft” inter- and intrapersonal skills?
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A large field experiment in Uganda is being conducted to understand the impacts of hard skills and soft skills courses on educational and labor market outcomes as well as on student psychological and reproductive health outcomes. This study randomly assigned recent high school graduates to a high quality, three week in-residence “mini MBA” offered in twenty different regional sites across Uganda. Two versions of the SEED (Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development) training camp were randomly offered to students: a course that focuses on hard skills training and a course that focuses on soft skills training.  Through a series of surveys, games, and tests, this experiment will help to understand the relative and absolute impacts of hard skills and soft skills trainings on entrepreneurship development and overall labor market success for youth. Researchers are currently analyzing preliminary results from this project. 

One of the greatest bureaucratic barriers to doing business in the developing world are building safety inspections (World Bank, 2011, 2013). In Peru, the low probabilty of firms facing audits leads to a reduced incentive to comply with the law and opportunities for auditor corruption and other types of leakages. The regulatory environment of building safety for businesses is characterized by high administrative costs and low compliance. As a result, eventhough regulations mandate that all new businesses pass the Building Safety Inspection (BSI) to receive an operating license, many firms fail to comply with the standards. In partnership with the World Bank Group and the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Peru), the BSI study tests whether varying audit intensities and establishing a pay-for-performance system for the auditors improves the effectiveness and reduces leakages in Peru's BSI system.

The study experimentally tests two interventions to tackle identified constraints in the context of the new regulation and measure their effect on: i) compliance with regulation, and ii) leakages among auditors. The Peruvian government plans to pilot the interventions in four municipalities.​ The main outcomes of interest in this impact evaluation are the probability of passing the audit satisfactorily, the administrative costs to firms to pass an audit, and productivity losses due to the process. The results will help the government calibrate new regulations for the gradual scale-up of the pilots nationwide.

The African Health Markets for Equity (AHME) Impact Evaluation aims to rigorously evaluate the extent to which transforming the business model of franchised healthcare providers and expanding access to demand-side financing generates effective and cost-effective coverage of priority technologies and interventions amongst the poor. The evaluation is a collaborative effort between Innovations for Poverty Action and researchers from multiple institutions, and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (DFID).
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The AHME intervention package will seek to improve efficiency in private health care delivery by reducing both supply-side and demand-side constraints that patients face in accessing high-quality care. Supply-side intervention will include (1) the social franchising of private clinics in order to improve consistency and quality of care and to reduce costs and (2) quality monitoring linked to capital financing in order to help clinics expand and improve clinical services. On the demand side, AHME will provide technical support to the NHIF as it expands its reach to include Q1 and Q2 households and will aim to increase NHIF registration among AHME clinics and other private provider networks (PPNs). In addition, opportunities to improve the operational efficiency of AHME interventions using information and communication technology (ICT) will be explored. 

Professor Gertler is leading a study to assess the demand for household connection to sewage services and the consequences of connection on housing markets in informal slums in Nairobi, Kenya. The Kenyan Government, through a loan from the World Bank, is installing a municipal sewage system in slums in Nairobi and other big cities in Kenya. However, the costs of household connection to the system are substantial. Gertler's team is implementing an RCT to estimate price elasticity of the demand for connections, the extent to which price elasticities depend on tenant knowledge of landlord investment costs, and the effects of sewer connection on rents and tenant tenure. They also consider complications related to collective action in multi-household compound connections and resident versus non-resident landlords. Results from this study are critical to developing pricing/subsidy and information campaign policies to cost-effectively improve connectivity. 

Implementing partners include the Athi Water Services Board, Nairobi Water, the World Bank and the Water and the Sanitation Program.  The research team includes Paul Gertler (UC Berkeley), Sebastian Galiani (University of Maryland), Alexandra Orsola-Vidal (CEGA, UC Berkeley), Aidan Coville (DIME) and IPA.

The Peruvian Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion operates a conditional cash transfer program called JUNTOS. The program provides a bi-monthly transfer of 200 Peruvian soles, approximately US$70, to 660,000 impoverished female heads of households who are either pregnant or have children under 19 years of age. The transfers are conditional on households providing access to education, nutrition, and health services for their children. The state bank, Banco de la Nación, opens a savings account for all JUNTOS beneficiaries. While 67 percent of users collect payments through these accounts (as opposed to delivery via armored transport), only 18 percent of users have a bank branch in their district. As a result, most users must collect their payments from a branch in a neighboring district.

Dr. Gertler's team are conducting a randomized evaluation to explore the impact of allowing JUNTOS beneficiaries to collect their payments though branchless banking agents. In the branchless banking system, local bank agents, typically shopkeepers, serve as deposit and withdrawal points for account holders to access their funds with debit cards. The agent based network will allow the national bank to increase the number of withdrawal points for JUNTOS users, reducing transportation costs and potentially giving users a greater degree of access to their accounts. If this is the case, users may begin to use their account to save more of their JUNTOS payments, making smaller and more frequent withdrawals. 

​In order to evaluate the effect of branchless banking, a sample of 60 sub-regional districts, each with approximately 300 JUNTOS beneficiaries, will be randomly assigned to one of three groups. In the first group, branchless banking agents will be established in each district, allowing beneficiaries to access and withdraw funds from their JUNTOS accounts. In the second group, branchless banking agents will be introduced and users will also receive basic financial literacy education and training on accessing their accounts through branchless banking agents. The third group will serve as a comparison group, where branchless banking agents will be introduced only after the twelve-month evaluation period. One year after banking agents are introduced, the researchers will collect information on savings and consumption behavior from household surveys. The study will also incorporate administrative account usage data from Banco de la Nación and the JUNTOS program to examine how beneficiaries use their accounts when they can access them through branchless banking agents.