Impact Evaluation of PNPM Generasi Program 2008-2009: Second Wave (Indonesia)

Abstract

PNPM Generasi known as the National Community Empowerment Program - Healthy and Smart Generation (Program National Pemberdayaan Masyarakat-Generasi Sehat dan Cerdas) began in mid-2007 in rural areas of five Indonesian provinces selected by the government: West Java, East Java, North Sulawesi, Gorontalo, and Nusa Tenggara Timur. The Generasi project is implemented by Indonesia’s Ministry of Home Affairs, and is funded through government of Indonesia resources, loans from the World Bank and grants from several bilateral donors.

In Generasi, all participating villages receive a block grant each year to improve education, and maternal and child health in their villages. The village block grants ranged from an average of $8,500 in 2007 up to an average of $18,200 in 2009.

In order to evaluate the overall impact of Generasi, as well as to separately identify the impact of Generasi's performance incentives, program locations were selected by lottery to form a randomized, controlled field experiment. Each location was randomly allocated to one of two versions of the program: an "incentivized" treatment with the pay-for-performance component (treatment A) and an otherwise identical "non-incentivized" treatment without the pay-for-performance incentives (treatment B).

The impact evaluation project was conducted from 2007 until 2010, in three waves. Documented here is the second round, carried out from October 2008 to January 2009.

The sample for the research covered each of the 300 subdistricts that were included in the original Generasi randomization. In each subdistrict, eight villages were randomly selected (unless the subdistrict had fewer than eight villages, in which case all were selected). Overall, 2,313 villages were sampled in each of the three survey waves.

The data for the impact analysis was gathered from surveys of households, mothers, health service providers, and school and village officials.