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Introduction
Typically, the
ability of any civil service reform program to meet its goals is
difficult to ascertain, given the lack of a baseline that describes
the pre-reform state of services. When designing a civil service
reform program, knowing the baseline will help a country set realistic
goals for the key outcome of reform, improvement in service delivery
to the pub-lic. The same indicators that determined the baseline
should be monitored and periodi-cally reported in order to measure
the progress of the reform program. In a quickly democratizing environment,
such information will be useful to all stakeholders regarding the
enhancement to service delivery on the ground. It will assist the
government and donors in responding more effectively to the ultimate
beneficiaries of government ser-vices, the public, particularly
the most vulnerable groups. The indicators will also facili-tate
the task of "result-oriented management," upon which governments
and donors increasingly focus, and will contribute in the medium-term
to the introduction of a perfor-mance appraisal system.
A pilot survey
to determine appropriate and useful indicators of service delivery
promises to improve the design and implementation of civil service
reform programs. A well designed survey will provide information
about services by country region, sector, and/or stakeholder and
be used to compare the effects of the program, or different pro-grams,
across time, sector, region or country It will have focused impact
through an easy--to-read format presenting the most important information.
policyrnakers need. Policy-makers will be presented with the chosen
indicators for the baseline and for subsequent periods. They will
also receive a list of programs and the major events/activities
that occurred in that year. In this way they will be able to assess
the outcomes in the context of the programs, and thus determine
which reforms yield the highest net marginal benefits and analyze
the relation between inputs, coverage, and outcomes.
The pilot survey
and the main survey can both be conducted at relatively low dollar
cost because it will use relevant Bank macroeconomic and sector
data that already exist, framing it in a new way. Primary research,
in the form of surveys to measure the percep-tions by the public
of service delivery and observations of actual -service delivery,
should be conducted by teams of nationals, after requisite training,
thus keeping costs down. The costs of the implementation stages
should also be kept down by using local enumerators supervised by
a local consultant. In this way, the survey will also help build
local capacity to design and implement indicators and surveys, and
to administer the surveys on a peri-odic basis.
The process
of design and implementation of the survey will help build into
the civil service reform process a greater attention to the ultimate
beneficiary of government ser-vices, the public. Investigating perceptions
implies valuing the customers' opinions, which will help move toward
a more customer-oriented government. This is quite a unique approach
for developing countries, where the objectives of reform programs
have concentrated on intraministerial processes, rather than the
impact of the reform on the cit-izens' lives. Although some efforts
have been made in the past to touch upon the issue of service delivery
through the citizens' eyes, most of these efforts have been in OECD,
not developing countries. The survey is quite innovative in attempting
to mea-sure the reforms from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective
by the central gov-ernment. The survey also has implications for
other reforms as well: for example, indicators measured on a regional
basis could yield information relevant to decentraliza-tion reforms.
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For details
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