(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Editor’s Note: June 18 through 20, 2018, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (Stanford PACS), the academic home of Stanford Social Innovation Review, hosted the annual Rockefeller Foundation Junior Scholars Forum at Stanford University. The event, now in its fifth year, brings together new researchers, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty, whose work covers civil society, the nonprofit sector, and philanthropy. Its purpose is to promote the scholarly community and to enhance the overall quality of research in the field. This report is one of four on research papers by scholars who participated in the forum.
Nongovernmental organizations are key actors in developing countries, where they frequently collaborate with governments to help deliver basic services. Such partnerships typically seek not simply to boost government resources but, more important, to effect reforms that survive after aid workers depart. But all too often, such collaborative efforts, while initially successful, eventually sputter and die. The question is why.
According to Emily Clough, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the answer can often be found by examining factors of political economy. She has studied an educational reform initiative in Punjab, India, that involved a partnership between the state government and an NGO offering literacy programming. Through interviews, data, and on-site observation, she examined the NGO’s efficacy in the context of the region’s institutional and political environment.
The program launched in 2008 in Punjab’s 13,500 primary schools, where teacher absenteeism and lagging basic skills were endemic. Although income in Punjab was above average for India, the school system suffered from understaffing, lack of training, and outdated teaching materials. Even more concerning, according to Clough, was an entrenched pattern of shirking, absenteeism, and corruption among teachers and principals. Professionally motivated educators were in the minority, career advancement was not tied to performance, transfers were frequent, and “the mechanisms of accountability and oversight of the ‘last mile’ of the state have tended to be dysfunctional,” Clough writes.
The NGO collaboration was approved, thanks to an earnest, reform-minded official named Krishan Kumar, who had been appointed head of the state education department a year earlier. Kumar was already instituting an accountability system and brought the NGO on board to improve student literacy and help him transform the education establishment. The partnership program trained government teachers to use a new methodology and materials for reading that had been developed by the NGO. The NGO hired about 1,000 coordinators at various levels plus 10,000 volunteers assigned to the schools.
Improvements didn’t go far enough at first, and early results were disappointing. As much as the NGO employees were integrated into the schools, they were perceived as outside the system and lacking authority. Some professionally minded teachers implemented the methodology and reported good outcomes, but widespread shirking remained a serious impediment to wider success, due to a lack of accountability. In response, Kumar constructed a new line of government supervisory posts, located away from local patronage networks, reporting to him, and charged with ensuring compliance and monitoring teachers via unannounced visits.
The new regime of transparent accountability improved bureaucratic behavior, and the program from 2009 to 2011 entered what some program officers called the “Golden Period.” Third-grade students in Punjab increased their reading levels by 16.4 percent compared with an overall decline in the rest of India.
“This case confirms the presence of benevolent public servants, even when least expected, in what are otherwise rent-seeking public bureaucracies,” says Jennifer Brinkerhoff, professor of public administration and international affairs at George Washington University.
The golden period was short-lived. As statewide elections approached, anti-reform political forces mobilized against the partnership program and used influence to transfer Kumar and others on his leadership team. “Government-involved cross-sector partnerships never occur in a vacuum,” Brinkerhoff observes. “Change agents like Kumar require institutional support, which requires not just connecting like-minded reformers but, at a minimum, benign neglect on the part of challenging political economies.”
Without an administration willing to enforce the rules from the top, the program slid downhill. Monitoring ceased to operate effectively, corruption reestablished itself, and teacher motivation and performance declined for all but a relatively few self-motivated professionals. Learning levels reversed their climb. After the program’s dissolution in 2013, its methodology and tools remained in use in the few schools that continued to be professionally run, but few traces were left elsewhere.
Recently, however, the political winds shifted: Kumar returned to Punjab as education secretary and is restoring the program. Consequently, Clough will be extending this study. “I am entering this next phase of research much more optimistic, given these developments,” she says.
Emily Clough, “The Inadequacy of Resources Without Reform: The Case of Partnered Provision NGOs,” working paper, 2018.
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.