Citizen Report Cards to Improve Service Delivery - South Africa ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

the efficacy of municipal agencies. The reputational competition arising from the report cards is enhanced by joint agency meetings attended by prominent social and political leaders and citizens. A Report Card is a tool to collect feedback from the users (and potential users) of public services and disseminate this information back to the citizens/users so they have reliable information about how their neighborhood/community at large views the quality and efficacy of service delivery, and so they can compare service delivery in their neighborhood vis-à-vis other neighborhoods in their city, larger metropolitan area, or across cities or municipalities in the country at large. The basic idea is that reliable and representative information about the users’ experiences and entitlements is critical for citizens’ ability to monitor service providers. It also improves users’ ability to challenge abuses of the system, since reliable quantitative information is more difficult for service providers to brush aside as anecdotal, partial, or simply irrelevant. Practically, a Report Card has three components: (a) collecting quantitative information from users (citizens) and service providers, using micro survey techniques; (b) assembling this information in “easy access/comprehensible report cards”; (c) disseminating the report cards to users and providers and providing them with practical information on how best to use this information; and (d) implementing repeat user and provider surveys to assess impact on service delivery outcomes. Proposal for Consultative Report Card in Municipal Services in South Africa Currently, a Consultative Report Card initiative is being trialed in South Africa in the metro Tshwane area (questionnaire attached), in collaboration with the National Treasury and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). Following the pilot, the plan is to extend the Report Cards to another 40 or so municipalities across South Africa, rural and urban. In all instances, the Report Cards will gather citizens’ input on the core services which municipalities are mandated to deliver, such as water, sanitation, waste disposal, etc. A critical element of the Report Card process will be to ensure there is effective dissemination of the data and information gathered from the Report Card to citizens of that municipality – they, after all, will be at the crux of demanding and pushing for better service delivery from the municipality. To assess the efficacy of the Report Card in stimulating citizens’ voice and pressure for change, another 40 municipalities will be selected as control group. This approach will allow a rigorous impact assessment to be undertaken to determine whether citizens’ access to information is, indeed, an important factor responsible for positive changes recorded in service delivery. Ideally, the Report Card activity will result in citizens in those municipalities having solid and reliable information about the coverage, quality, and efficiency of services in their own neighborhood/municipality and the information necessary to assess service delivery in their locality relative to the other municipalities and to the national average. Advocacy based on such information can then lead to real improvements on the ground. The Tshwane pilot Report Card pilot is expected to be completed by the end of October 2006. The expansion to other municipalities will begin as of November 2006, including surveys of users and service providers. Dissemination activities will take place in mid-2007 (and will possibly be repeated after a few months). The repeat surveys of users and providers to assess the impact of this intervention will be implemented in June-July 2008. 4
Impact Evaluation of the Report Cards Identifying and implementing incentives that give rise to a strong relationship of accountability between service providers and beneficiaries is viewed by many as critical for improving service delivery. How to achieve this, however, is less understood. Systematic evaluation of service delivery innovations to increase accountability can show what works, what doesn’t and why, a first step to scaling up successes. There are many different ways to evaluate a program/project, each subject to more or less serious constraints. An impact evaluation attempts to answer the counterfactual question: how would individuals or municipalities that participated in a program, for instance, the Report Cards, have fared in the absence of the program? The difficulty with this question is immediate: at a given point in time, an individual or municipality is observed to either be exposed or not exposed to the program. It is therefore not possible to obtain an estimate of the impact of the program on each individual or municipality. However, it may be possible to obtain the average impact of the program by comparing participating municipalities (the treatment group) with a similar group of municipalities who are not exposed to the program (the control group). One implication of this is that an evaluation based on statistical methods requires are “large” sample. This is one reason why the Report Card project will take its starting point the municipal level. The problem facing an evaluator is how to design the evaluation study so as to establish a credible comparison group -- a group of municipalities who in the absence of the program would have had outcomes similar to those who were exposed to the program. This group should give us an idea of what would have happened to the members of the program group, if they had not been exposed to the Report Card, and thus allow us to obtain an estimate of the average impact on the group in question. To solve this problem, program evaluations typically need to be carefully planned in advance in order to determine which group is a likely control group. One credible way to ensure that the treatment and comparison groups are similar is to select randomly from a potential population of participants (such as municipalities). If the sample is large enough, one can then be assured that, on average, those who are exposed to the program are no different than those who are not, and thus that a statistically significant difference between the groups in the outcomes the program was planning to affect can be confidently attributed to the program. To evaluate a program, one also needs to have a quantifiable outcome measure(s). This, in turn, requires knowledge of how the program possibly could influence outcomes. In this particular case, we require knowledge about how households with access to information on how the local providers, and/or local government, perform (and what citizens are entitled to) can possibly influence the services they receive. A necessary condition for this to be the case is that the local providers and/or local governments must be able to influence the outcomes that are measured and that one of the reasons the initial outcomes are suboptimal is related to choices made by the provider or local government (for example, budgets are spent on items not benefiting the intended beneficiary, or low effort is exerted in executing local programs). 5
Page 1 and 2: South Africa Citizen Report Cards t
Page 3: Governments have tried to compensat

Citizen Report Cards to Improve Service Delivery - South Africa ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?