POLICY BRIEF
Empowering Communities and
Incentivizing Teachers to Accelerate
Learning in Remote Areas of Indonesia
Background
Teacher accountability is a key challenge to
improving public education quality, particularly
in more remote parts of Indonesia. The rate of
teacher absenteeism in Indonesia has declined over
the past decade, but it remains high in remote areas
(19.3 percent) compared to the national rate (9.4
percent) (Usman et al., 2004; ACDP, 2014). High teacher
absenteeism rates negatively affected student learning
and were associated with higher student absenteeism
and drop-out rates (Usman et al., 2004; UNICEF, 2012;
Hasan et al., eds, 2013; Suryahadi and Sambodho,
2013). Weak capacity to enforce quality standards, both
at the top (government) and the bottom (community)
further contribute to the lack of improvement.
Teacher absenteeism rate in Indonesia
Rem o t e a re a s Na t i o nal
19.3% 9.4%
1
This Policy Brief summarizes findings from two studies:
(1) World Bank. 2020. Community Participation and Teacher Accountability:
Improving Learning Outcomes in Remote Areas of Indonesia.
(2) Gaduh, A., Pradhan, M., Priebe, J., and Susanti, D. 2020. Scores, Camera,
Action? Incentivizing Teachers in Remote Areas. RISE Working Paper Series.
20/035. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-WP_2020/035.
July 2020
1
When low service quality arises from inadequate
accountability, incentives need to be part
of a strategy to improve the accountability
relationship between stakeholders and service
providers (World Bank, 2003; Pritchett, 2015). First,
there needs to be clarity on the stakeholder’s objectives
and what the service provider must do to achieve these.
Second, the stakeholder needs information to evaluate
service provider performance. Finally, accountability
relationships also require motivation — i.e., an incentive
“contract” specifying the rewards (or punishment) for
good (or bad) performance to affect service providers’
intrinsic or extrinsic motivation.
The Government of Indonesia has introduced
several reforms to improve the quality of
education but learning outcomes have continued
to lag. Reforms have included the provision of cash
transfers to students from impoverished backgrounds
and greater educational resources to schools,
improvements to teacher qualifications, improved
community participation through school committees,
and benchmarking of student performance using
international assessments. Despite these reforms,
student learning outcomes have remained flat, near the
bottom of international achievement test league tables
(Beatty et al. 2018; OECD 2017; World Bank 2013).
POLICY BRIEF

In 2016, the World Bank through KIAT Guru began
to support the Government of Indonesia’s efforts
to promote social accountability for better teacher
performance in remote areas. At the community
level, KIAT Guru makes benchmarked data on learning
outcomes available to education stakeholders,
facilitates service performance standards, evaluates
teacher performance against these standards, and
provides communities with the means to voice their
concerns and dissatisfaction. KIAT Guru empowers
communities to support and monitor teachers and ties
the payment of the government-financed remote area
allowance (RAA) to teacher presence or teacher service
performance, thereby holding teachers accountable
for performance.

Scope and Methodology

About
K I AT Gu ru P ilo t The KIAT Guru pilot was implemented in 203 schools in 5 districts across
East Nusa Tenggara and West Kalimantan provinces in Indonesia from
I mp lem en t ed fro m October 2016 until March 2019. The pilot was conducted in close collaboration
Oc t ober 2 0 1 6 u nt i l with the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K), the
Ma rc h 2 0 1 9
Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC), and the participating
in
district governments. Districts were selected from the central government’s
203sc h ools
list of disadvantaged regions, while accounting for cost and implementation
considerations. Within each district, schools that satisfied the study’s remoteness
criteria and had a minimum number of teachers receiving the Remote Area
Allowance (RAA) were included. In the study area, RAA ranged from IDR 1.5 million
in
($US 103), to an average of IDR 2.9 million ($US 200). Researchers randomly

5
dist r ic t s
&
2
p rov i nc e s
assigned schools to the control and treatment groups.
KIAT Guru combined a social accountability mechanism (SAM) with a
pay-for-performance mechanism (PPM) to improve teacher presence,
teacher service performance, and student learning outcomes in remote
West
K alimantan schools. The project supported participating schools to develop a joint
agreement between communities and teachers that included locally identified
and agreed indicators designed to improve the learning environment in school
and at home. The SAM was combined with two variants of PPM, which linked the
payment of teachers’ RAA with assessments of their presence or service quality.
The two mechanisms were combined into three intervention groups: (1) SAM,
East N usa
Tenggara (2) SAM + PPM based on teacher presence verified by a tamper-proof Android-
based camera application (SAM+Cam), and (3) SAM + PPM based on a broad
measure of the quality of teacher service performance (SAM+Score).
The three interventions vary in the way the teacher scorecards translate
into teacher incentives — creating three different variations of the
delegation-information-motivation relationship. Treatment 1 (hereafter,
SAM) relies entirely on the social accountability mechanism. Monthly meetings
between teachers, community members and village leadership provide informal
pressure if teacher performance falls short of an agreed commitment to improve
service delivery. Administrators are also informed of scores and can act upon
them. Treatments 2 and 3 add to this a pay-for-performance mechanism (PPM).
In these treatments, poor performance leads to cuts to the RAA. In Treatment 2
(hereafter, SAM+Cam), the cut is based on the teacher presence indicator only,
which is objectively verified using a tamper-proof smartphone camera provided
to the schools. In Treatment 3 (hereafter, SAM+Score), the cut is based on the
overall score on the scorecard. However, these schools did not receive the
tamper-proof camera. Teachers with full scores, and teachers in control and SAM
groups always receive their full RAA.
 Empowering Communities and Incentivizing Teachers to Accelerate Learning in Remote Areas of Indonesia

Table 1. Summary of the Treatments

Control SAM SAM + Cam SAM + Score

SAM: Scorecards and user commitee No Yes Yes Yes

PPM: Presence indicator No No Yes Yes
PPM: Indicators other than presence No No No Yes
Temper-proof camera No No Yes No
Number of schools 67 68 68 67

Key Findings that the scores function as a bargaining tool that do

All treatments led to learning improvements,
with SAM+Cam proving to be most effective. The
SAM and SAM+Score led to similar improvements in
learning. In comparison, adding the Cam aspect to
SAM approximately doubled the effect sizes: SAM+Cam
led to improvements in Indonesian and mathematics
by 0.17 and 0.20 standard deviation.2 Overall, these
impacts do not differ by gender, but are stronger for
students in earlier grades and those who performed
better at baseline. The creation of a formal structure
to empower local school communities and centering
their work on monitoring teacher presence appears to
be most effective in improving educational services for
rural and remote school.
not always translate into penalties.
The pilot provides qualitative insights into how an
innovative social accountability model resulted
in significant improvements in student learning
outcomes. Social accountability is more effective when
it is linked with an objective enforcement mechanism.
KIAT Guru’s success is attributed to five key elements:
actively engaging external stakeholders in
monitoring and evaluating teacher attendance
and service performance,
increasing parental involvement in learning,
keeping teacher performance indicators simple,

The treatments increased teacher presence in
schools and improved parental behavior and
perception of the school. Across all treatments,
teachers were more likely to be in school when they
were supposed to. They were more likely to teach
instead of doing administrative or other work in class.
Parents in treatment communities increased education
expenditures and were more likely to find additional
support (such as a tutor) for their children. Moreover,
parents in treatment communities also interacted more
with teachers and were more satisfied with education
service delivery and their children’s schools in general.
The evidence suggests that increased top-
down supervision and informal community
pressure are at play in delivering results. Across
the board, principals increased their supervision of
teachers. Supervision from district officials and school
inspectors also increased in SAM+Cam. Teacher scores
are generally very high at around 95 percent of the
maximum score. The average salary cut for teachers
who received the RAA was 5 percent. This indicates
2
It is important to emphasize that the relative success of SAM+Cam over
SAM is not evidence of the effectiveness of a pure Cam treatment. The
difference between SAM+Cam and SAM cannot be interpreted as the
positive impact of a pure camera-based performance-pay treatment without
assuming no interaction effects between SAM and the attendance-based,
camera-supported performance-pay interventions.
using objective rather than subjective measures
to evaluate teacher performance, and
Rp paying teacher allowances based on objective
performance indicators. In the schools that
achieved the most impressive gains, the goals
of KIAT Guru and the roles and responsibilities
of various stakeholders were made clear with
noteworthy transparency.
Data collected by the qualitative researchers
indicates that implementation of the KIAT Guru
project had a strong and pervasive impact on
the schools included in the study. The researchers
concluded that in all locations, the quality of teaching
and school-community relations improved over the
course of the project. Education stakeholders opined
that the introduction of KIAT Guru exerted a particularly
powerful impact on:
1. teacher attendance,
2. parent attitudes about student learning,
3. teacher performance,
4. student attitudes about learning,
5. teacher discipline, and
6. stakeholder relations.
Based on KIAT Guru results, in 2019, the formally excused by the principal. The monthly meeting
Government of Indonesia began to expand results are shared at the village, district, and national
the scope of SAM+Cam to 410 primary schools. level, and RAA for eligible teachers are paid based on
The World Bank continues to provide technical their presence in school. At the end of every semester,
assistance by simplifying and further digitizing essential another diagnostic student learning assessment will
processes. A diagnostic student learning assessment kickstart a village-wide meeting to identify progress and
test, administered by parents and community areas of improvements for the upcoming semester.
representatives on mobile phones, becomes the
basis for school stakeholders to prioritize three joint
agreement indicators, which link efforts from principals,
teachers, and parents to improve learning environment
at school and home. Education stakeholders meet
every month to discuss its implementation and record
the results electronically. In this monthly meeting,
parents also check whether teachers’ absences are

Recommendations
A strategic approach that integrates
social accountability with measures to
increase public sector responsiveness
outperforms a tactical approach
that relies on information alone
to generate collective action and
influence public sector performance.
The pilot demonstrates that such a strategic approach can be
implemented using a government-financed allowance. While all
treatments lead to learning improvements, the treatment which
combines social accountability with a simple pay-for-performance
scheme based on teacher presence aided by a tamper-proof camera
worked best in improving learning outcomes.

A simple transparent rule,
even though it only targets
and incomplete measure of
performance such as teacher
presence, can work better than a
comprehensive evaluation which
is more prone to subjectivity.
This finding is relevant to many developing countries where governments
find it difficult to hold teachers accountable. The comparison of two
different pay for performance mechanisms shows that a simple
contract based on monitoring presence only works better than a more
comprehensive, less well specified one. This is an important question
that arises in many labor contracts (Baker et al., 1994; Khan et al., 2016).
While the study finds some evidence of teachers shifting focus to tasks
which are easy to observe, the overall impact on learning is the highest
for the contract that puts the strongest incentive on teacher presence.
This simple contract also leads to less conflict at the community level.

SAM+Cam offers the most Institutionalizing a formal mechanism for connecting communities to the
promising approach and schools and including them in school improvement initiatives produces
outcomes worth considering improvements in the schools. In addition, tying teacher allowance
for policy and implementation to teacher presence evidenced the greatest potential for producing
rollout. long-lasting change. Teachers felt that community representatives
were assigned clear and well-defined tasks. Community engagements
also encouraged teachers to invest more effort in their professional
responsibilities.

Acknowledgment:
The papers and the policy brief are the products of the World Bank Indonesia’s Social Sustainability and Inclusion Global Practice. Financial
support for the pilot was generously provided by the Government of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) through the Local
Solutions to Poverty and USAID’s Local Solutions to Development Trust Funds. RISE Study in Indonesia, managed by SMERU Research Institute,
co-financed the second round of impact evaluation surveys. The Task Team was led by Dewi Susanti. Christopher Bjork, Arya Gaduh, Menno
Pradhan, Jan Priebe, and Dewi Susanti wrote the papers. Dinda Putri Hapsari and Megha Kapoor wrote the policy brief. Yohanes Aji designed the
policy brief, Rebekka Hutabarat and Fazlania Zain provided an overall support. For more information, please contact: dsusanti@worldbank.org.