Niger: Impact Evaluation Design and Implementation Services

As part of the Millennium Challenge Corporation's mandate to reduce poverty through economic growth, its threshold programs assist countries that are on the “threshold” of eligibility for large-scale Millennium Challenge Account grants, or compacts. Threshold program assistance helps countries address areas for improvement indicated by their scores on 17 policy indicators in three categories—ruling justly, investing in people, and encouraging economic freedom.

The $23 million Threshold program in Niger is intended to reduce government corruption; encourage entrepreneurship; promote land ownership; and increase girls’ school enrollment, attendance, and completion rates. The effort involves training civil servants to conduct audits and handle public procurement projects, establishing “one-stop centers” to provide technical assistance to businesses, developing awareness-raising campaigns to encourage communities to take advantage of land reform, and constructing schools.

Specifically, the goals of the program are to reduce public corruption, with an emphasis on the health and education sectors, by strengthening the legal framework, improving public procurement systems and supporting the anticorruption efforts of civil society and the media. The program’s goals are also to streamline the process of starting a business by establishing the administrative, legal and regulatory structures required to implement business facilitation reforms. To improve land rights and access, the program seeks to help improve policy reforms to reduce the time and costs associated with land ownership transfer, land valuation, building permitting and notarization. Finally, the program will attempt to bolster demand for girls’ education by implementing public awareness campaigns, improving the quality of teaching, establishing methods to motivate and retain students, specifically girls, and building “girl-friendly” schools.

Mathematica is designing and conducting a rigorous evaluation of these activities to determine their ultimate impact on both intermediate and long-term outcomes. Alternative methodologies to conduct the impact evaluation may include pre-post or interrupted time-series designs for the corruption and land registration components, and randomized roll-out for the girls’ education interventions. We will conduct independent data collection by surveying households and schools in rural villages on education and overseeing the collection of administrative data on land and business registration and the procurement process.

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