The Project

Despite considerable investment, public services in most developing countries are widely perceived to be unsatisfactory and deteriorating. The poor and disadvantaged in developing countries suffer in relation to delivery of public services. Firstly, they lack access to those services due to physical, financial, informational, political and other barriers. Secondly, they lack effective mechanisms for feeding back their complaints, views and requests in relation to those services. As a result, public services to the poor lack transparency, accountability and quality. The poor and the disadvantaged are particularly vulnerable as they rely completely on the state for accessing critical services like drinking water, health and education. There is no `exit’ option available to these users to seek an alternative provider in case of dissatisfaction with the service provided. (Gopakumar K et al 2002)

The project, Improving Transparency, Quality and Effectiveness of Pro-Poor Public Services through the use of ICTs, focuses largely on access to information and the inadequate state of grievance redress and feedback mechanisms on services to poor women and men and the opportunities for ICT to strengthen those mechanisms.

Certain applications of ICT may be relevant to particular local circumstances. However, the common core of this project is to combine ICT with the report card methodology and with other participatory techniques. Recent action research has shown the effectiveness of report card techniques – simple adaptations of market survey methods that gather views from the poor about various public services. This bottom up approach is in contrast to traditional ICT approaches (and indeed public service provision) which tend to be top down and are unresponsive to user needs. Results of such surveys are communicated to appropriate government authorities and also publicised, thus providing a powerful tool for empowerment of the poor and for improved quality of public services for the poor.

This project has identified and used the appropriate ICT to disseminate information to service providers and users and provide an appropriate means by which the poor can provide feedback to governments on the service provided.

As well as applying these ICT applications to feedback/grievance redress systems related to 'traditionally-delivered' public services; each National Chapter has applied them to at least one example of e-services to the poor. Whilst external assessors have sometimes evaluated such initiatives, there has been little or no attempt to date to build in ongoing feedback from poor service users. Yet such continuous and integrated feedback systems will be essential to ensuring that e-services do meet the real needs of the poor. For the purposes of this project, the term ICT has been used in its broadest sense and encompasses a variety of different mediums including telephone, internet, television, film, radio etc.