#1407 1997 · Government of Uganda (Ministries of Finance and Local Government) · Public finance / primary education
Uganda cut school-grant theft by publishing every monthly transfer in the newspapers
the problem
Schools got 20 cents of each capitation-grant dollar; auditors and courts could not touch district officials
background
Uganda's capitation grants for primary schools flowed from the central budget through district administrations to the schools. A mid-1990s public expenditure tracking survey — government statisticians working with World Bank researchers — found schools received on average only 20 cents of every dollar allocated; the rest disappeared between district and school. The standard remedies were useless: judges, police and audit departments were embedded in the same patronage system they would have to police.
When the extent of diversion became known in 1996, the ministries of Finance and Local Government tried something that added no new institution: they began publishing, in national newspapers — The New Vision with its local-language editions, and The Monitor — the monthly transfers of capitation grants to each district, alongside each school's entitlement and responsibilities under the universal primary education program, and occasional stories on misuse.
what everyone would do
Commission another audit, tighten the financial-management system, or prosecute — each adds another intermediary with discretion inside a state that cannot police itself; the newspaper campaign instead removed the officials' informational advantage at near-zero cost.
what they saw
Corruption lived on an information asymmetry: schools did not know what they were owed. Publish the entitlement and the transfer, and every parent becomes an auditor — no new bureaucracy, just a number in a newspaper.
the move
The published number armed the cheapest auditors available: parents and head teachers. A head teacher who knew the school's per-pupil entitlement and could read in the paper what the district had received that month could confront officials or complain upward with facts instead of suspicion; every kiosk selling newspapers became a disclosure terminal. Researchers exploited the natural experiment in exposure — schools' varying distance to the nearest newspaper outlet — to measure the effect.
why it works
Diversion survived because the victim could not observe the crime: each school saw only what arrived. The transfer number already existed — the finance ministry initiates it — so printing it adds no bureaucracy and cannot be blamed on anyone new. Head teachers and parents gain both the fact (per-pupil entitlement) and the proof (the district's monthly transfer in print), which converts complaints from suspicion into verifiable claims and raises the expected cost of diversion. The dose-response confirms the mechanism: schools closer to newspaper outlets — more exposure, more knowledge — saw larger reductions in leakage (13.8 percentage points more).
the payoff
Schools' share of entitlements rose from 20 cents on the dollar to 80% by 2001; those nearer newspaper outlets gained 13.8 points more
where it breaks
It needs media that officials cannot silence and a center willing to expose its own districts — in captured-press states nothing prints. It works on rule-based, quantifiable transfers where a published entitlement can be reconciled; discretionary programs leak in ways no number captures. It disciplines the middle of the chain but not the endpoint — later research found head-teacher-level leakage persists once the district level is squeezed.
what came after
The finding — bottom-up information disciplining leakage where top-down audit fails — seeded public expenditure tracking surveys and transparency interventions across the developing world, with replications and critiques (Kuecken 2019) still running decades later.
references
- [1]The Power of Information: Evidence from a Newspaper Campaign to Reduce Capture (working paper)IIES, Stockholm University (published in Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(3)), 2006perseus.iies.su.se
- [2]Local Capture: Evidence from a Central Government Transfer Program in Uganda (QJE 119(2))Quarterly Journal of Economics (author copy), 2004jakobsvensson.com