Recruiting and Incentivizing Service Providers: Evidence from Sierra Leone

• In Event: Bureaucratic Recruitment and Incentives

Abstract

We evaluate the impact of recruitment and monitoring strategies for community-level service providers on their performance and characteristics. We propose a theory of public service provision in which selection procedures affect a worker's embeddedness and intrinsic motivation, which in turn shape workers' response to material (pay-for-performance) and non-material (pressure from community monitoring meetings) incentives. We then randomly manipulate the degree of community involvement in selecting and monitoring village-level animal health workers in a sample of 300 communities in Sierra Leone. We find that both material and non-material rewards can considerably improve the quality of service provision, while selection procedures do not seem to play a crucial role.

Authors

• Macartan Humphreys, WZB

• Salif Jaiteh, Columbia University

• Carlo Prato, Columbia University

• Maarten Voors, Wageninen University

• Peter Van der Windt