This paper presents a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized nongovernmental organizations encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities are more involved in monitoring the provider, and the health workers appear to exert higher effort to serve the community. We document large increases in utilization and improved health outcomes—reduced child mortality and increased child weight—that compare favorably to some of the more successful community-based intervention trials reported in the medical literature.

This study provides evidence on the relative effectiveness of computer-assisted learning (CAL) software and traditional teaching. Based on a field experiment in Salvadoran primary schools, we evaluate three interventions that aim to improve learning in mathematics: (i) additional teacher-led classes, (ii) additional CAL classes monitored by a supervisor, and (iii) additional CAL classes instructed by a teacher. We find that CAL lessons lead to larger learning gains and are less sensitive to class size as well as student ability than teacher-centered classes. Our results highlight the value of CAL in an environment with heterogeneous classes and poorly qualified teachers.