Information for Accountability: Transparency and Citizen Engagement for Improved Service Delivery in Education Systems

This paper explores what we know about the impact of information-based initiatives on increased engagement, accountability, or improved decision-making at the school-level, which could then lead to improved education quality and student learning. It summarizes and builds on recent large-scale conceptual frameworks and a growing evidence base of impact evaluations, and extracts lessons from case study research in Australia, Moldova, Pakistan, and the Philippines to provide nuanced insight into processes and mechanisms behind reform efforts. It also exploits findings from recent impact valuations after categorizing them according to the intensity of interventions and their target change agents -- parents, teachers, school principals, and local officials. The findings suggest that few initiatives have led to improved service delivery at the school level and evidence on enhanced learning outcomes is limited, in part because they are rarely tracked. While there is scope for improving such demand-side interventions, we conclude that systemic change will additionally require improved accountability mechanisms and greater use of relevant data and evidence internally within bureaucracies.