NGOs and the Effectiveness of Interventions
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Key Findings
- The effectiveness of a technology adoption intervention was at least 30% higher in villages where the implementing NGO had prior relationships, compared to villages where it had not worked before.
- The NGO’s existing community relationships mattered more than the specific type of program being offered.
- The “NGO effect” was strongest in the first few months of the new program, showing the importance of trust in early adoption.
- Programs launched in villages without prior engagement with this NGO saw lower sustained participation, even when offering identical benefits.
Programs implemented by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are often more effective than comparable efforts by other actors, yet relatively little is known about how implementer identity drives final outcomes. By combining a stratified field experiment in India with a triple-difference estimation strategy, we show that a local development NGO’s prior engagement with target communities increases the effectiveness of a technology promotion program implemented in these areas by at least 30%. This “NGO reputation effect” has implications for the generalizability and scalability of evidence from experimental research conducted with local implementation partners.
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