GRANT APPLICATION Korean Trust Fund for ICT4D E-monitoring of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Rural Morocco Submitted By Najy Benhassine (nbenhassine@worldbank.org) Last Edited May 23, 2008 Printed June 13, 2008 Basic Facts Country/Region Project Sector Morocco Education OUI 7019 Amount Requested US$ 386,000 Primary Area Originating Dept/Division TTL Mainstreaming MNSED and MNSHD. Najy Benhassine Narrative 1. Objective Provide brief overall project objective, including intended impact. (Max. 500 words) BACKGROUND: Morocco recently achieved close to universal primary enrollment rates. However, in rural areas, only about half of first graders actually complete primary school, with higher drop-out rates for girls. In order to reduce absenteeism and drop-out rates, the Government of Morocco (GoM) is launching a Conditional Cash Transfer program (CCT) that will provide cash transfers to rural families, conditional on their children attending school. The World Bank is providing technical assistance to the Ministry of Education (MoE) in the design and rigorous impact evaluation of that Government-financed program. SUMMARY OF PROPOSED PROJECT OBJECTIVE: The proposed project, would be to expand that program to a group of 60 schools, where an innovative IT tool would be installed to improve the effectiveness of the CCT, reduce opportunities of misreporting and fraud, and improve incentives of all actors for greater impact on school attendance and poverty reduction. The infra-red fingertip device, to be installed in each classroom, would enable to collect very reliable daily information on school attendance of each student. That information would serve as a basis for the disbursement of the cash transfer to the students' parents. INTENDED IMPACT OF E-MONITORING: The introduction of reliable e-monitoring is intended to significantly improve the governance
and the effectiveness of the CCT program. First, it will ensure that attendance monitoring data is of highly reliable quality, eliminating opportunities for mistakes and fraud. Daily information on the time of arrival and departure will be recorded for each child, who will need to click on the device upon arrival in class as well as upon dismissal at the end of the school day. This IT-enabled monitoring will leave no room for discretionary reporting of attendance by school teachers or principals. It will ensure minimal misreporting. It will also eliminate opportunities for fraud and corruption. Second, e-monitoring will significantly reduce the cost of monitoring for the MoE. In the other schools that will benefit from the CCT, monitoring will involve frequent physical inspections. As most schools have no road access in the targeted rural areas, these physical inspections will be very costly, in addition to being of low reliability. Also, daily presence registries filled by teachers will need to be physically transmitted to the Ministry and entered in a database. This operation will also be of high cost, for quite unreliable data that is prone to misreporting. Finally, it is expected that e-monitoring will also positively affect the school teachers' and principals behavior and compliance with the CCT conditions. The reliability of the e-monitoring is expected to reduce teachers absenteeism, and improve proactivity on the part of the schools staff to encourage drop-outs and absentees to come back to school. Ultimately, the project is expected to significantly improve the effectiveness of the CCT program, and therefore reduce drop-out rates (in particular for girls, as they will receive a slightly higher cash transfer), improve attendance and learning, and help reduce poverty - in the short term thanks to the cash transfers, and in the longer term via the improved rural education outcomes and increased chances of a better future for these children. 2. Rationale Indicate the innovative features of the project and how it plays a catalytic role in Bank Group operations. In what way does it have an impact on core Bank business? (Max. 250 words) 3. Program Description Describe project design including approach, components, resources stakeholder roles, etc. (Max. 1000 words) The difficulty in implementing Conditional Cash Transfer programs lies in the effective monitoring of the conditionality (in this case, the presence of the child in class), using reliable information that is not prone to misreporting or fraud. This is what this e-monitoring project aims to address in an innovative way. The proposed infra-red fingertip device aims at ensuring a cost-effective and highly reliable monitoring tool for students attendance. The device will eliminate all opportunities for fraud, discretionary behavior or corruption. It will reduce the cost of monitoring. It will also ensure credibility of the conditional aspect of the CCT (in view of parents, school staff and ministry officials). If successful, this innovation could be replicated in other areas of Morocco and to other social sectors. It would be the first initiative in the MENA region to mainstream IT into the monitoring of a Government education program, and could be replicated in other countries. An e-government initiative in nature, such innovation would find applications in other areas where Government monitoring of public service is key. Another innovative feature of this project is the rigor by which its impact will be evaluated. The beneficiary schools will be randomly selected, so we will be able to rigorously compare the project impacts with schools that either not benefited from a CCT program, or that have benefited from a CCT but with traditional physical monitoring. This project will be the first randomized evaluation in the MENA region of such scale. It is expected that this innovation will also be prone to be replicated in other Bank Group operations. The fact that it will be rigorously evaluated, in cooperation with the leading academia on impact evaluations of public policies (Prof. Duflo of MIT, head of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is our academic advisor on this project), will also give it high credibility and visibility. As such, it is expected to have impact on core Bank business in the social sectors, as well as in the areas of public administration reform and anti-corruption. A/ DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT: The project aims at evaluating the impact of a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program that uses an IT-enabled monitoring system, on educational and poverty outcomes. The measured impact will also be compared to the one of a traditional CCT program that will be administered by the GoM to other schools, where monitoring will be done physically. Traditional methods of monitoring attendance are costly and are prone to mistakes, fraud and corruption. Instead, the 60 beneficiary schools in this project will be subject to quasi-perfect e- monitoring. The daily attendance data can be downloaded from the infra-red fingertip machine using a simple USB key. The device does not require maintenance and runs on batteries. It has been tested successfully in rural India in a similar project conducted by the J-PAL laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (our technical partner in this project). The database of students' fingertips will be initialized on the first day of school and the data will be regularly transferred to the Ministry of Education to serve as a basis of allocation of the
cash transfers. While the Government of Morocco will finance and administer the actual cash transfers, the Bank technical assistance and capacity building project for which we are seeking KTF financing will: i) Support the GoM in the design of the intervention and the randomized sampling of the 60 additional beneficiary schools that will be the object of e-monitoring. ii) Finance the development of the database software that will be used to process the collected attendance data. iii) Train a team of MoE staff and enumerators that will be in charge of testing the devices, installing them in all classrooms of the 60 schools (in collaboration with MoE staff). iv) Organize the launch of the project in the 60 beneficiary schools, as well as the data collection efforts throughout the first school year and the first semester of the second school year...v) Conduct the data cleaning and analysis, and prepare and disseminate the impact evaluation report of this intervention. B/ IMPACT EVALUATION DESIGN: The target area will be rural provinces where the school drop-out rates are the highest. 60 treatment schools will be chosen randomly. The sample will be designed so that these beneficiary schools will have very similar characteristics to the other 180 schools where the GoM will administer a traditional (physically monitored) CCT program. A similar group of 100 schools that will not benefit from any intervention will be randomly selected to act as a control group for this evaluation. The randomized design of the intervention ensures that any significant difference in outcomes between the treatment and control groups of schools will be attributable to the project intervention, and not to any other variable. Schools will be surveyed quarterly and attendance data will be collected throughout the school year. Standardized test scores will be administered before and after the intervention. Household surveys will also be conducted at the start of the project and after the first school year. C/ EXPECTED OUTCOMES AND IMPACTS OF THE PROJECT: The expected outcomes of introducing IT-enabled monitoring of the CCT program are: (i) To provide high-quality, reliable attendance data to better inform the decision to grant cash transfers to parent. Compared to the groups of schools that will benefit from a physicallymonitored CCT program, it is expected that the IT-enabled program will have significantly less misreporting and fraud, as well as significantly less drop-outs. (ii) Increase the transparency of the administration of the CCT project, with electronic data that will be shared and which will flow faster between the relevant administrative units, and that will be prone to significantly less mistakes or fraudulent changes. (iii) To affect the attitude and incentives of schools staff, parents and children. The introduction of this reliable e-monitoring device is expected to reduce teachers absenteeism. It is also expected to increase the pro-activeness of school principals and teachers in followingup with absentee children. Finally, it will also increase the credibility and sense of fairness of the CCT program in the eyes of the beneficiary populations. Ultimately, the expected impact is to reduce school drop-out rates (by at least 20 percent), and improve attendance and learning. We expect an specific impact on schooling outcome for girls, as they have higher drop-out rates and the project will administer slightly higher transfer for them, compared to boys. These educational improvements should lead to reduced poverty in the longer term by improving the future economic prospects of the beneficiary children. The other expected short-term impact is to reduce poverty among the beneficiary households which will receive the cash transfers. The program will randomly assign the transfer to the mother or the father of each child, in order to evaluate the differential impact on household expenditures and welfare. Outcome indicators will include: school attendance (in school days); the net enrollment rate of the relevant age groups; the drop-out rate (in percent lost from one primary year to another) for girls and boys; learning performance (standardized tests will be administered before and after the intervention); teachers absenteeism; and measures of the program relative effectiveness to other CCT schools (cost, level of fraud and mis-reporting, reliability of data, pro-activity of school staff, etc.). Household level surveys will also measure the impact of transfers on consumption and welfare.
D/ STAKEHOLDERS: This overall CCT program is financed and run by the Government of Morocco (Ministry of Education). The proposed IT-enabled monitoring CCT project which intends to extend this program to 60 additional schools is therefore strongly demand-driven. The project and its impact evaluation will be done in partnership with an academic team specialized in randomized evaluations: the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) of the MIT (www.povertyactionlab.org). Our academic advisor is J-PAL co-founder and director Prof. Esther Dulfo. J-PAL is represented in Morocco by two permanent staff. The project will be partly financed out of the World Bank budget. Other co-financers are the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) and the Gender Action Plan Trust Fund. A network of NGOs that are partnering with the GoM on a parallel social project (INDH) will help with information dissemination, as well as with school staff training on the use of the finger-tip device. A team of about 35 staff from the regional directorates of the Ministry of Education will benefit from a training in the use of the IT device and the related database management software. 4. Program Duration Indicate the expected duration of the project. 5. Fit with Strategies Describe how project fits with or supports sector, regional and country strategies. Highlight any relationship to an existing Bank operation or program. (Max. 500 words) 18 months Human development and a more equitable access to public services is a key pillar of the Morocco Country Assistance Strategy (CAS). The proposed IT-enabled monitoring tool as support to the CCT program also has a strong public governance/anti-corruption aspect - a key trasnversal pillar of the CAS (as well as of the regional strategy). The project also has a strong gender aspect to it. First, girls have higher drop-out rates than boys. Therefore a more effective IT-enabled CCT program will especially benefit girls. Also, to give them more incentives to stay in school, the cash transfers will be higher for girls. Finally, cash transfers will be randomly allocated to mothers or fathers, in order to assess the impact of securing revenues to mothers of poor families. As such, the project also fits a major pillar of the MENA regional strategy (gender equity). The proposed project is an offspring of a Bank operation with the GoM (PARSEM project). Initial consultations and design for this project, was conducted under the umbrella of the PARSEM. It is also a complent to an ongoing technical assistance activity to the GoM for the impact evaluation of a program to reduce school drop-outs. This activity has been approved in the work program agreement with the CMU for FY09, FY10 and FY11. Target Countries 6. Target Countries Asia: Africa: Latin America: Middle East & North Africa: Morocco Europe & Central Asia: Categorization 7. ICT Program Areas Select all applicable program areas and categorization. Access: Mainstreaming: Education Public Administration and e-government Anti-Corruption Efforts
Social inclusion and development Gender equality Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Regional Scope: Country-specific 8. Deliverable Type Technical Assistance and Capacity-Building Activities 9. Activity Executed By World Bank Key Stakeholders 10. Key Stakeholders and Other Interested Parties Please list key stakeholders and other interested parties, both recipients and beneficiaries, in the government, private sector, and elsewhere. Government Private Sector (Large) Private Sector (SME) Other Recipients Beneficiaries Ministry of Education. Beneficiary of technical assistance and capacity building in the impact evaluation of the project. i) Primary school students; ii) household beneficiaries of cash transfers; iii) team of 80 recent graduates who will benefit from the training and involvement in the project. Timeline & Milestones 10. Estimated Timeline & Activity Milestones Please include titles and completion dates for each deliverable. Deliverables Date Estimated Start Date 21 Jul, 2008 Project launch summary report 19 Dec, 2008 Progress report on project implementation 17 Jul, 2009 First draft impact evaluation of project 15 Nov, 2009 Final report dissemination 15 Jan, 2010 Estimated End Date 20 Jan, 2010 Risks 11. Risks Affecting Project Implementation Identify and explain briefly major risks (including political, environmental, security, governance, and implementation) to project implementation, and measures to address these risks. Type of Risk Brief Description Measure to Mitigate Risk Political risk of opposition of some stakeholders (local MoE staff or teachers) to the ITenabled monitoring tool when the project starts. In addition to the sensitivity of the proposed IT monitoring tool (fingertips), one of its purpose is to address the risk of fraud and corruption in schools. Both of these may run against local opposition from teachers or other local MoE Very strong buy-in of MoE which is planning a careful communication campaign to inform local stakeholders about the benefits of the project (via INDH NGOs). Also, the project was initiated with the support of the principal advisor to the King. King cabinet staff involved in the project design and roll-out on a continuous basis. Strong
Risk of delay in installation of infrared fingertip boxes. staff (especially in the context of upcoming local elections). The IT-enabled monitoring needs to be in place by September 15. System needs to be tested and running by school start. Risk of delay would jeopardize efficacy of monitoring. partnership with all stakeholders. MIT's J-PAL lab has samples of the fingertip boxes (from the India project). These will be installed and tested in sample schools in June 08. Chinese manufacturer of these devises have been informed of likely upcoming order from J-PAL (the devises will be leased from J-PAL for the duration of the project). Objective is to have all boxes (about 600 of them) shipped to Morocco by mid-july, so that MoE teams can install during month of August. Program Team 12. Program Team Please provide names of all principal team members. Core Team Members Transaction leader/ contact person Other team members (including back-ups) Najy Benhassine(MNSED) Name(s) Rachidi Radji, Rebekka Grun (MNSHD) Management Team Managing unit manager Director Name(s) Zoubida Allaoua (MNSED), Mourad Ezzine (MNSHD) Ritva Reinikka (MNSED), Steen Lau Jorgensen (MNSHD) Financing Plan 14. Budget/Financing Plan Please enter the column totals from the spreadsheet template here. Column Total Amount (US$) KTF Request 386,000 Co-financing 4,190,000 World Bank Group 140,000 Total Cost 4,716,000 Monitoring & Evaluation 15. Outputs Please fill in the key measurable performance indicators for each component. These M&E milestones need to include base line data, expected value and intermediate achievements (collected during supervision). Measurable Indicators Baseline Value Intermediate Value Expected Final Value Drop-out rates by grade (all) TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 Drop-out rates by grade (girls) TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 Attendance rate by grade (percent) TBD - December 08 December 09 December 10 Attendance rate by grade (percent, girls) TBD - December 09 Dcember 10
Test scores 4th grade (math, science, Arabic, French) December 08 TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 Household expenditure pattern TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 Intra-household occupation pattern TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 Monitoring cost (per school) TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 Monitoring effectiveness of IT-enabled device (compared to standard monitoring) TBD - June 08 June 09 June 10 16. Outcomes By project component please enter the tasks to be performed, their outcomes and their expected long term impact. Project Activities Expected Outcomes Expected Impacts Introduction of ITenabled monitoring tool (infra-red fingertips) for the CCT project. Randomized sampling of beneficiary e- monitored CCT schools (impact evaluation relative to a control group and to a group of traditional-cct schools). i) Cost-efficient and highly reliable monitoring of children presence, that informs the MoE database for conditional disbursement of cash transfers to families. ii) Absence of risk of mis-reporting and fraud. iii) Change in school staff behavior and incentives (absenteeism, pro-activity in retaining children) i) First rigorous differential impact assessment of IT-enabled intervention in education. ii) Comparative impact evaluation with traditional CCT program aiming at reducing drop-out rates. i) Reduced drop-out rates, especially for girls. ii) Reduced misreporting of presence (and reduced fraud). iii) Increased attendance rates (less absenteism of children as well as teachers). iv) Improved learning outcomes (test scores). v) Poverty reduction effect of cash transfers, and long term effect of improved educational outcomes. i) Generalization to all Morocco rural primary schools of the most cost-effective intervention, ultimately affecting positively primary completion rates at the national level. ii) Use of IT-enabled monitoring tool in other provision of government services that are sensitive to monitoring (e.g. health).