| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
|
|
a2i works to bring about a paradigm shift in the Bangladesh Civil Service, away from its rigid, rule-based roots primarily designed to control, towards a modern, citizen-centric and flexible service delivery system designed to serve. a2i’s initiatives are more creative and innovative in terms of:
• Service Process Simplification (SPS) and TCV measurement: Equipping civil servants with a tool to simplify access to public services, thereby reducing the time, cost and number of visits (TCV) required for citizens to access them.
• Up-scaling programmes: After hundreds of innovation pilots, selecting the ones that have the potential for large impact and designing and partnering for countrywide expansion.
• Policy Support: Ensuring policy formulation to ensure institutional adoption and sustainability.
• Public-Private Partnership: By bringing in the private sector, in the form of the entrepreneurs at the local level and corporate entities at the national level.
• Social Media in Public Service Innovation: Redress citizens’ grievances, break down hierarchical barriers in communication, and create a peer-support and mentorship network within the civil service to nurture a culture of citizen-centric public service innovation.
• Incentives and mentoring for innovators: Introducing Service Innovation Fund (SIF), Empathy Tranining, and Innovation Awards, nurture a culture of innovation.
|
|
| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
|
|
The initiative is implemented by the Prime Minister’s Office through a2i Programme. The Programme is supported by the Government of Bangladesh, UNDP, and USAID. In collaboration with a2i, the initiative was executed by respective Ministries, Departments, Directorates, and Field Level Administration. It provides technical assistance to respective authorities (Ministries, Departments, Directorates, and Field Level Administration) for building their capacity and to implement the initiatives.
The programme is being implemented across the country and the total population of Bangladesh are the beneficiaries of this programme. However, the biggest focus is the underserved, including the poor, the marginalized, persons with disabilities, living mostly in the rural areas. The programme aims at delivering easily accessible, affordable and quality services to the citizens across the country. For example, a total of 5,000+ Digital Centers established all over the country run by 10,000+ entrepreneurs of whom 50% are women. These Digital Centers have been providing 114 types of public and private services and ensured access to information and services for rural people. Teachers Portal, is a sharing and learning platform for all primary, secondary and higher secondary school teachers. All necessary digital contents can be found in this portal to facilitate multimedia classrooms. Currently, a total of 1,50,000 teachers are active members while 101,000 educational contents are available at Teachers’ Portal. Using Facebook in public activities ‘Innovation Practices for Public Services’ has become supportive power. Currently, social media are being used in more than 5,000 government offices where more than 2.5 million common citizens are connected with these platforms. a2i has developed National Portal, considered as the world’s largest government portal, that has integrated 43,000 government offices in a single platform and providing information services to all citizens of Bangladesh – this portal received about 60 million hits every month. Thus, a2i has been an instrumental enabling force for all citizens of Bangladesh.
|
| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
|
|
Access to Information (a2i) Programme drives the creation of a public service innovation ecosystem and delivery infrastructure from the Prime Minister’s Office working closely with the Cabinet Division.
a2i’s unique, simple and powerful Innovation Lab+ model revolves around:
• Establishing delivery platforms enabling ‘Services for All’: The driving mantra of Access to information (a2i) Programme is ‘Services at Doorsteps for All’. a2i emphasized on capacity building, partnership, empathy-change in mind-set to provide citizen centric service.
• Simplifying through ‘SPS’: This term is considered as equipping civil servants with a tool to simplify access to public services, thereby reducing the time, cost and number of visits (TCV) required for citizens to access them. Officers from 55 directorates/public agencies have been trained to simplify their services.
• Cultivating ‘Empathy’: Empathy training for the civil servants to help embark on a journey of innovating citizen-centric public services.
• Supporting innovation through ‘SIF’: a2i’s Service Innovation Fund (SIF) was designed as a seed funding mechanism for incubating cost-effective, user-centric, home-grown innovations to solve some of the most important problems affecting underserved communities. More than 133 projects have been selected to implement using SIF fund.
• Celebrating innovators with ‘Innovation Fairs, Innovation Summits and Innovation Awards’: The summits and in particular, the district level innovation fairs organized across all 64 districts of the country, are a key element of our strategy to make the entire innovation culture in Bangladesh public facing. Also The Civil Service in Development Innovation Summits are high-profile, international events, hosted by the Honorable Prime Minister’s Office, that bring together remarkable innovators, development practitioners, heads of states, ministers, bureaucrats and thought leaders from the world’s most respected ‘innovation nations’, companies and academic institutions.
a2i mobilizes its resources with the extensive participation mechanisms of local, national, government and international commitment. These include providing technical trainings, extensive community participation mechanisms, generation of local economic benefits, institutional stability, and international commitment to programme goals. Although the programme is run by the Government of Bangladesh, UNDP and USAID, the a2i programme mobilizes its resources through private sector funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), World Bank, ILO, the Chinese Government and other institutions for testing and implementing different initiatives. They provide intellectual, technological and institutional support to develop products and implement programmes across the country.
|
|
| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
|
|
a2i primarily remains a catalyst in all initiatives and actively nurtures ownership among change champions from within all ministries, directorates, departments, district and sub-district administrative heads, and representatives from local government institutions. Together, they form a2i’s guiding coalition, which plays a crucial role in ensuring that service reforms are successful and sustainable. However, a2i, in partnership with ministries, runs a few flagship large-scale initiatives that need ownership of many ministries. a2i programme, run by Prime Minister’s Office and supported by UNDP and USAID, is designed in collaboration with different ministries, directorates, departments and private sector, such as;
• Digital Centre and service delivery partnerships: Local Government Division, private sector and public sector providers
• Administrative partnership for wide-scale governance reform: Cabinet Division, Ministry of Public Administration, Deputy Commissioners Offices.
• Education partnerships: Ministry of Education, Ministry of Primary and Mass Education.
• Financial inclusion partnerships: Bangladesh Bank, and other banks.
• Technology partnerships: ICT Division, Posts and Telecommunications Division, Bangladesh Computer Council, Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, Google, Facebook, Telenor, Mozilla, etc.
• Academic and research partnerships: Public Universities (University of Dhaka, Jahangirnagar Univeristy, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, University of Rajshahi, University of Chittagong) of Bangladesh, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Maldives, Griffith University, University of Cambridge, International Growth Centre, National University of Singapore, Khan Academy, London School of Economics, The Beharoural Insights Team, Innovations for Poverty Action, Japan International Cooperation Agency, The Better Than Cash, The CGAP, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, EGL Singapore, Telenor, Mozilla Foundation, Google, and so on.
|
|
| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
|
|
a2i has been implementing diverse programmes to establish ‘Digital Bangladesh’ where the aim is to make public services more prompt, cheaper and hassle-free. However, there are many initiatives that proved most successful, such as:
• Digital Centres: A total of 5,286 Digital Centers have been established all over the country in which 114 types of public and private services are provided. On an average a total of 5.1 million services are provided from these digital centres in a month. This initiative won the ITU’s WSIS Award in 2014.
• National Portal: ‘All services in a single platform’ is the aim of this world’s largest government web portal (www.bangladesh.gov.bd) which received WSIS Award 2015 for its outstanding contribution in implementing the Right to Information Law. 43,000 offices of the government are under this portal featuring about 2 million contents and receiving 60 million hits every month.
• Teachers’ portal: It is a sharing and learning platform for all primary, secondary and higher secondary school teachers. There are 150,000 active members and 101,000 educational contents in this portal. It is bringing a paradigm shift in teacher training in Bangladesh by introducing the concept of peer-to-peer training which is addressing teacher trainer shortages and also lack of refresher training. This initiative received the WSIS Award in 2016.
• Service Process Simplification (SPS): a2i’s initiative to implement SPS for improving the quality of services trained government organizations to apply 400+ vital services. This initiative also received the WSIS Award in 2016.
• Service Innovation Fund (SIF): The SIF opened up an unprecedented opportunity to incubate solutions from both government and non-government actors. Since launching, SIF has completed 8 rounds. Nearly half of the 2, 800 plus proposals to the Fund came from the private sector, NGOs, Universities and even individual innovators.
• Empathy training: a2i’s empathy methodology has empowered hundreds of civil servants to redesign services in a citizen-centric manner and launch Innovation Pilots around the country, especially at the field level.
• E-filing: This is the government’s day-to-day decision support system that was popularized from the district offices and making its way up to the ministries and directorates. The target is to run 19,000+ offices of the government by 2018. This initiative won the Open Group Architecture Award in 2017.
• Social Media in Public Service: Social media, especially Facebook has become a good platform of grievance redressal in public activities Facebook is in use in more than 5000 government departments where 2.5 million citizens are connected.
• MuktoPaath: ‘MuktoPaath’ (www.muktopaath.gov.bd) is an open e-learning Bangla Platform. Anyone from anywhere at any time can engage in this to acquire knowledge and skills. There are 90,000 active members in MuktoPaath.
|
|
| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
|
|
The first major obstacle was a service delivery paradigm that existed to control and rule than to facilitate and serve making things very complicated for common citizens. The SPS methodology met with significant resistance from civil service because of fear of change. a2i decided to pursue a slower approach and initially trained 120 officers from 36 departments to methodically identify and simplify the most vital service processes. These officers became ‘champions of change’ and acted as inspiration to the rest of civil service. This allowed a2i to expand the SPS training to thousands of civil servants. SPS was made a policy mandate by incorporating it into the Annual Performance Agreement of every agency in the government. Later, ‘Empathy Training’ enabled service providers to ‘walk a mile in the shoes of the customers’ to re-design the service delivery process from their perspective.
The need for strict adherence to rules straitjacketed most civil servants into inaction and even fear about trying to change the existing paradigm. A combination of Service Innovation Fund (SIF), Innovation competitions and Awards, and the assurance from PMO that ‘Failure is OK’ incentivized many to experiment with new, citizen-centric ideas. Many of these ideas generated very useful innovations. Many of those innovations created tremendous benefits for the citizens. The policy support that a2i was able to mobilize from the PMO and Cabinet Division facilitated institutionalization of these changes enabling massive transformation.
The most difficult challenge was from vested interest groups within and outside of the government who materially benefited from inefficiency, delay and opacity of the service delivery processes. Fedex-like tracking mechanism, social media-based complaint management methods allowing extreme transparency and public monitoring broke some stronghold of vested interest groups. But in many other cases, only partial success was achieved and extremely context-specific methods had to be introduced.
|