Social and economic impacts of Tuungane: final report on the effects of a communitydriven reconstruction programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This report provides the results of an assessment of the impacts of Tuungane, a major UK government funded Community Driven Reconstruction (CDR) Program implemented by the IRC and CARE International in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Project goals and activities: The Tuungane program has been working since 2007 in 1,250 war-affected villages with a targeted beneficiary population of approximately 1,780,000 people. Over this period Tuungane organized the election of village committees in all of these villages, as well as training in leadership, good governance, and social inclusion. The elected committees then worked with populations to select development projects and oversee the implementation of these projects. In the first (village level) stage of Tuungane I, which is the focus of our analysis, the project supported the construction or rehabilitation of 1,700 classrooms and 150 clinics as well as projects to support infrastructure and livelihood development. The theory behind the Tuungane intervention is that training, coupled with exposure to and practice in accountable governance in the context of these projects, can produce learning-by-doing and bring about change in local accountability and social cohesion as well as improve the welfare of communities. Assessing Impact: This research project, mounted in partnership with IRC, sought to measure whether these objectives were met. In order to measure the causal effects of Tuungane, we employ the method of randomized intervention. The Tuungane communities were randomly selected through public lotteries from a larger pool of potential participating communities. This feature allows us to observe a set of control communities that are similar (in expectation) to the Tuungane communities in every respect except for the presence of the program. Also, among a sub-sample of those selected, a randomly selected set of communities implemented a variation of the program in which community development committees were not required to have gender parity. Innovations in Measurement: The key innovation of this research is the introduction of a novel collection of measures to assess behavioral changes. The core behavioral measures are generated through the introduction of an entirely new and distinct unconditional cash transfer scheme (RAPID) in which a randomly selected set of 560 villages in treatment and control areas (with populations between 200 and 2,000) were selected to receive block grants of $1,000 which they could manage as they saw fit with minimal oversight and guidance. The key impact question then becomes: did areas that took part in Tuungane engage differently …