When Do Services Reach the Poor? Transparency, Street-Level Discretion and Pro-Poor Targeting

Despite increased investments and attention from the international development community and national governments, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are not on track to meet a number of Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, focusing on national targets can mask considerable discrepancies across geographic areas and communities, with the poor continuing to be left behind in many places. This paper seeks explanations for such persistent inequality in development outcomes that goes beyond the availability and distribution of resources. Specifically, we suggest that the constraints poor citizens face do not primarily reflect unequal opportunities to physically access public services, but rather discrepancies in terms of their needs being met by service providers, what we term effective access. We suggest that in many cases effective access is constrained not by discriminatory patterns of resource allocation (as held by much of the literature), but rather by lack of transparency, information asymmetries and a lack of economic bargaining capacity in petty corruption intense services that citizens encountered in street-level interactions with services providers. Using Afrobarometer data we show that poor citizens are more likely than their non-poor counterparts to come into contact with public schools and health facilities. However, the poor face consistently greater difficulties when it comes to obtaining the services they need once in contact with the relevant facilities. We explore several potential mechanisms and explanations for this disadvantage.