The Challenge

Around the world, nudges such as text message reminders have been effective in encouraging individuals to adopt practices that can improve their lives, including early childhood vaccination, mobile money account usage, parental involvement in children’s learning, and more. Evidence suggests that nudges work particularly well when they are personalized and target people who are lagging behind, stimulating them to act.¹ Moreover, with their impact, they can serve as a cheaper alternative in changing behavior to monetary incentives, which can be cost-prohibitive when trying to reach a large population.

Given their advantages, text message nudges offer an opportunity to extend into improving how governments deliver public services. Many low- and middle-income governments like Peru contend with limited capacity and resources that make it difficult for civil servants to effectively carry out their responsibilities, leading to service gaps.² For instance, the Ministry of Education’s School Infrastructure and Maintenance Program allocates money transfers to a coordinator in charge of regular maintenance activities at schools to improve and modernize infrastructure. However, the program historically contended with insufficient use of funds and a lack of expense reporting, preventing schools from receiving upgrades that were needed. Can behavioral nudges translate to this new context and improve performance among government workers?

The Evaluation

In collaboration with IPA Peru and the Ministry of Education, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to measure whether a text message campaign improved maintenance coordinators’ compliance with the School Infrastructure and Furniture Maintenance Program. Specifically, the campaign used different behavioral nudges to assess the impact on withdrawal of maintenance transfers and expense reporting.

The intervention involved 24,268 schools across Peru in 2015, which were randomly assigned to one of the following six groups:

• Comparison: Maintenance coordinators did not receive any text messages.
• Reminder: Messages reminded maintenance coordinators of necessary program activities and well-known deadlines. This was to overcome limited attention challenges.
• Salience of monitoring: Messages told maintenance coordinators their level of compliance to increase the salience of oversight that was already occurring.
• Social norms: Messages emphasized that most of the maintenance coordinators were complying, appealing to people’s desire to conform to peer behavior and serving as a reminder that their noncompliance was visible to their supervisors.
• Soft shaming: Messages reminded maintenance coordinators that their names would appear in a public list in case of noncompliance.
• Salience of auditing: Messages informed maintenance coordinators that they would be visited to supervise their activities, increasing the salience of consequences and loss of public status.

In 2016, researchers conducted a follow-up text message campaign to evaluate its impact on compliance with the maintenance program as well as to measure whether receiving the 2015 campaign impacted compliance in 2016. In the same year, they assessed the generalizability of text message campaigns across the government by working with the national early childhood development program Cuna Más to measure whether field monitors were more likely to file mandated reports about household visits.

Results

Overall, the text message campaign increased school maintenance coordinators’ compliance with the School Infrastructure and Furniture Maintenance Program. Expense reporting increased by 3.9 percentage points from 74 percent—closing the gap between current levels of compliance and full compliance by 15 percent. Meanwhile, the likelihood that at least 95 percent of allocated funds were withdrawn increased by 1.5 percentage points from 89 percent, closing the compliance gap by 13 percent. All message types were effective, indicating that they served primarily as reminders for maintenance officials.

The follow-up campaign in 2016 also yielded positive impacts. School maintenance coordinators were 1.7 percentage points more likely to file expense reports from 81 percent, closing the compliance gap by 9 percent. Moreover, schools that received the campaign in both years increased their compliance compared to schools that received it only in 2016, suggesting that continued exposure can be effective.

Furthermore, the text messages were effective in a different government context. Cuna Más early childhood development monitors who received text messages increased their likelihood of filing mandated field reports by 4.85 percentage points from 70 percent, closing the compliance gap by 16 percent. In particular, the most effective messages were those that made monitoring salient.

Altogether, the results suggest that text message campaigns can be a cost-effective, scalable approach for governments to improve service delivery. A caveat is that the characteristics of civil servants being targeted (such as tenure and contract type) matter in producing the most effective behavioral messages.

Sources

^1. Carrión-Yaguana, Vanessa D., Jeffrey Alwang, and Victor H. Barrera. "Promoting behavioral change using text messages: A case study of blackberry farmers in Ecuador." Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 52, no. 3 (2020): 398-419.

Marcus, Maja E., Anna Reuter, Lisa Rogge, and Sebastian Vollmer. "The effect of SMS reminders on health screening uptake: A randomized experiment in Indonesia." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 227 (2024): 106715.

^2. Matthew Eldridge, “To Efficiently and Equitably Fund Necessary Services, Local Governments in Developing Countries First Need to Overcome Political Barriers,” Urban Institute, July 20, 2022

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