Field
August 2019
In many developing countries, poor delivery of public services remains an important problem. Through community-based monitoring, beneficiaries of public services can apply bottom-up pressure to under-performing service providers and their political leadership. In this spirit, the Government of Uganda organizes community forums - popularly known as barazas - where citizens receive information from government officials and get the opportunity to challenge them. Tewodaj Mogues, Bjorn Van Campenhout, Nassul Kabunga, and Caroline designed a cluster randomized control trial to assess the impact of this policy intervention on public service delivery. Bjorn and Caroline visited Uganda to test and finalize the endline questionnaires and prepare the data collection.
April - June 2021
Agricultural technologies remain under-adopted among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Bjorn Van Campenhout, Robert Sparrow, David Spielman, and Caroline investigate how the quality of an agricultural input affects its adoption by designing several field experiments. Three innovative interventions are implemented at different levels of the seed supply chain and their effectiveness is tested in a series of randomized control trials among 350 agro-input dealers and 3500 smallholder maize farmers. Caroline visited Uganda for the baseline data collection and for the implementation of the three interventions, namely an ICT-mediated information campaign for farmers (photo 1 below), a crowd-sourced information clearinghouse targeting the interaction between dealers and farmers (photo 2 below), and an intensive training program for agro-input dealers (photo 3 below).
January - February 2022
Caroline stayed in Iganga, Busoga, Uganda for the midline data collection and a second round of implementations of the ICT-mediated information campaign for farmers and the crowd-sourced information clearinghouse. She enjoyed a diverse set of tasks and was for example responsible for COVID-testing the team of 28 enumerators every second day (see photo).
