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Replication Data for: Leveraging text messages to improve community worker performance: Evidence from child protection in Sierra Leone

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Leveraging text messages to improve community worker performance: Evidence from child protection in Sierra Leone
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TSYLUP
 
Creator Sheely, Ryan
Dixit, Akshay
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description We leverage a field experiment to estimate the effect of SMS messages on the performance of child protection community workers in Sierra Leone. The messages were aimed at improving the visibility of newly recruited workers in their communities, by prompting them to engage more with people on child protection issues. The treatment consisted of weekly text messages, including questions about specific child welfare issues in the villages, sent by staff based in the capital to newly recruited community workers based in villages. Workers were asked to engage with people in their village to identify answers to these questions. We posit that the text messages were effective at prompting workers to act: The average respondent in communities in which workers received these messages was 36% more likely to be aware of the child protection worker in their village, 34% more likely to have spoken to the worker and 48% more likely to say that villagers report child rights violations to the worker. These treatment effects were mainly driven by communities with higher pre-treatment levels of social capital. However, the treatment did not have a discernible impact on child abuse or heavy work.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Dixit, Akshay