Improving service delivery for the poor is an important way to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty. Are You Being Served? presents and evaluates tools and techniques to measure service delivery and increase quality in health and education.

The authors highlight field experience in deploying these methods through a series of case studies from 12 countries around the world. Different methodological tools used to evaluate public-sector performance are presented along with country-specifi c experiences that highlight the challenges and lessons learned in using different techniques. The findings show that, while measuring quality is rarely easy, the resulting data can be a powerful tool for policy change.

Better measurement of service delivery can create greater accountability and better governance. Are You Being Served? will be a valuable resource for those working in international organizations and for government officials seeking to effectively measure service delivery quality in developing countries.

One of the cornerstones in building policies to improve welfare is the services that governments offer to citizens. In most countries, governments provide some form of basic education and health services. Governments also supply a variety of other services ranging from essential public goods such as police services to administrative services such as drivers’ licenses. Taken as a whole, those services are critical for economic growth and the reduction of poverty.

Although we have an array of tools and techniques to measure ultimate welfare outcomes, our tools for measuring the services aimed at improving these outcomes are less well developed. This book explores some of those tools, their uses, and the way they are implemented in practice. Through those lessons, we may expand our understanding of welfare outcomes and the processes of accountability, governance, and service delivery that help produce these outcomes. ...

Download Are You Being Served? New Tools for Measuring Service Delivery

PDF format, 2.5MB, 454Pages.

EDITED BY Samia Amin, Jishnu Das, Markus Goldstein
© 2008 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank

Forward:

Experience shows that increasing government spending on public services alone is not sufficient to raise standards of living and improve access to health, education, and other public services. Although significant strides have been made in expanding access to education and health services in the past decade, the quality of those services remains a serious concern.

Strengthening accountability and supporting governance reforms in service delivery are thus major priorities for the World Bank and its development partners.

A wide array of instruments has been developed in an effort to measure the performance and quality of public services. However, our knowledge of how to use and customize those new tools to country circumstances and of the limited available data is still at a basic level. This knowledge poses a key challenge because many of the policy options for reducing poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals rely on improving the supply and quality of public services.

This volume provides an overview of a range of tools for measuring service delivery and offers valuable lessons on the opportunities and constraints practitioners face in measuring performance. The authors investigate country cases using data from a range of sources in a variety of contexts. Their experiences yield important insights on how to avoid pitfalls, what practices to improve, and how to learn the most from the data at hand.

Taken together, those lessons represent an important step in strengthening accountability and governance so as to enhance service delivery. They will, we hope, lead to an important advance in our thinking.

Danny Leipziger
Vice President and Head of Network
Poverty Reduction and Economic, The World Bank

Joy Phumaphi
Vice President and Head of Network
Human Development Management, The World Bank

Visit Are You Being Served? World Bank Website

This volume provides an overview of a range of tools for measuring service delivery and offers valuable lessons on the opportunities and constraints practitioners face in measuring performance. The authors investigate country cases using data from a range of sources in a variety of contexts. Their experiences yield important insights on how to avoid pitfalls, what practices to improve, and how to learn the most from the data at hand.

Taken together, those lessons represent an important step in strengthening accountability and governance so as to enhance service delivery. Empirical investigations of the relationship between particular characteristics of the public provisioning of goods and services at the local level and the characteristics of the localities receiving these goods and services may help us understand the impact of policy and learn to design more effective public interventions. Monitoring data are an integral part of the process of learning about the performance of any social program.

Many impact evaluations of social programs assume that the interventions occur at specified launch dates and produce equal and constant changes in conditions among eligible beneficiary groups.

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