Does community driven development work? : evidence from Senegal

Abstract

Community Driven Development (CDD) programs are an extremely important component of the World Bank's portfolio in the developing world, representing close to $7 billion in 2003, yet solid empirical evidence on their impact is relatively scarce, especially for Sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, we consider the impact on access to basic services, household expenditures and child anthropometries of the PNIR (Programme National d'lnfrastructures Rurales) CDD project in Senegal using a unique multidimensional panel dataset on rural households that we followed over a two-year period. Using a variety of estimation procedures, including instrumental variables, and working at different levels of aggregation, we find statistically significant and quantitatively important effects of the program on access by villagers to clean water and health services, as well as on standard measures of child malnutrition.