Interventions to promote social cohesion in sub-Saharan Africa

This article presents a synthetic review of impact evaluations examining the effectiveness of community-driven development (CDD) and curriculum interventions in improving social cohesion in sub-Saharan Africa. The review found weakly positive impacts of CDD and curriculum interventions on social cohesion outcomes, although only two findings were replicated across studies: one positive and one negative. Causal chain analysis of data on implementation and contextual factors relating to the CDD interventions found that broad and substantive participation was often lacking, suggesting the interventions have often not been carried out in accordance with the theory of CDD.