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Teacher absenteeism is an important obstacle to sustained learning gains in many developing countries. We report the results from a randomized evaluation of an adult education program in Niger, which included an additional intervention designed to improve teacher accountability and students' learning. Villages were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first was a two-year adult education program, with normal visits by non-governmental organization (NGO) and Ministry staff. The second included the same curriculum and visits as the first, but villages also received a mobile intervention: weekly phone calls to the teacher, village chief and two randomly selected students. The third was a pure control group, with no adult education program or calls. We find that both interventions improved students' learning outcomes: across both years of the program, students in the standard adult education program increased their math and reading test scores by 0.19–0.22 s.d, respectively. The mobile phone intervention led to an additional increase in math and reading test scores of 0.12 and 0.15 s.d., with stronger effects amongst called students. We also address alternative threats to identification, namely, differential attrition and baseline imbalance, and find that the math results are robust across these different specifications. This suggests that using mobile phone technology as a means to communicate with teachers and students can improve learning outcomes, beyond its use as a pedagogical tool within the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cash transfers have become an increasingly important component of social protection policies in both developed and developing countries. While such programs are often implemented electronically in developed countries, in many developing countries with weak financial infrastructure, such transfers are distributed manually, resulting in significant costs to program recipients and the public sector alike. The introduction of mobile money systems in many developing countries offers new opportunities for distributing cash transfers. Using data from a randomized experiment of a mobile money cash transfer program in Niger, we find evidence of benefits of this new system: household diet diversity was 9%–16% higher among households who received mobile transfers, and children ate an additional one-third of a meal per day. These results can be partially attributed to time savings associated with mobile transfers, as program recipients spent less time traveling to and waiting for their transfer. They are also associated with shifts in intrahousehold bargaining power for women. These results suggest that electronic transfers may address key logistical challenges in implementing cash transfer programs in developing countries but that sufficient investment in the payments infrastructure is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread growth of mobile phone coverage worldwide has offered new potential for increasing rural households’ access to information and public and private transfers. Yet despite the proliferation of mobile phone-based interventions in the agricultural sector, there is mixed evidence on their impact. We report the results of a randomized evaluation in Niger, in which rural households increased their access to information technology and their capacity to use it. We find that households in treated villages planted a more diverse basket of crops, particularly marginal cash crops grown by women. This did not increase the likelihood of selling these crops or the farm-gate price received, suggesting that other market failures need to be addressed to improve farmers’ welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]