Partner Spotlight: Seva Mandir
Seva Mandir is one of J-PAL’s oldest and most established partners—first randomizing additional teachers into non-formal schools in 1997. Today, Seva Mandir remains a pioneer—implementing new strategies to improve the lives of the poor and testing them through randomized evaluations.
Working in remote, tribal communities in the often harsh environment of the mountains around
Seva Mandir works with more than 600 communities to enable them to participate more meaningfully in democratic processes and improve their lives through health, education, empowerment, livelihoods, and natural resource development. It reaches out to more than 70,000 households and affects the livelihood of up to 360,000 people.
Seva Mandir’s strategy has shifted over the decades from an initial focus on increasing literacy to a broader goal of creating the necessary conditions under which people can collaborate to solve their own problems. In order to achieve this, village committees of elected local men and women plan and manage various programs with Seva Mandir’s assistance, fostering a high degree of local participation.
In J-PAL’s first collaboration with Seva Mandir, Abhijit Banerjee, Jacob Suraj, and Michael Kremer, along with Peter and Jenny Lanjou, discovered that placing an extra teacher (a female teacher when possible) in single teacher non-formal schools run by Seva Mandir increased the number of girls attending school by 50 percent. However, the study found that having an extra teacher did not reduce absenteeism among teachers, and sometimes led to the original teacher being absent more often. A later study (with Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, and Stephen Ryan) looked more directly at the issue of teacher absenteeism in remote rural non formal schools. This time the intervention was more successful and found that linking teachers’ pay to their attendance as verified by date- and time-stamped cameras cut their absence rate in half, while increasing the students’ test scores. A further education program currently being evaluated looks at the role of intrinsic motivation of teachers and students in improving education outcomes.
Other joint work between Seva Mandir and J-PAL includes a series of health projects in 134 villages in Seva Mandir’s work area (with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Rachel Glennerster). Already this work has shown the effectiveness of small incentives in increasing immunization rates, and demonstrated the problems with setting up incentive schemes to address absence if the government system does not enforce sanctions on absent nurses. Another project attempts to address widespread anemia by providing local millers with iron powder that villagers can request to have mixed in with their grains. Results from these studies will be covered in this and other J-PAL publications.
Learn more about the health projects
Learn more about the camera project
