In the Evaluation section:
Evaluation
eTransparency and Poor Communities
In my e-transparency project, what factors should I bear in mind for poor communities?
eGovernment projects in developing/transitional countries sometimes take the needs of poor communities into special consideration. This page provides a checklist of factors to be borne in mind when this happens for an e-transparency project.
Checklist of Potential Benefits for Poor Communities
The potential benefits of e-transparency projects generally are described elsewhere. Here, we look at some of the potential benefits that might be specifically delivered to poor communities. Links to case examples are provided. However, in every example, it is only potential benefits that are identified - there seem to be few, if any, e-transparency projects to date that are sustainably delivering real benefits to poor communities.
- Financial benefits: financial savings can be provided in three main ways through the process improvement and disintermediation benefits offered by ICTs in e-transparency projects. First, there are direct savings where the client pays less for data or a service (including paying less for bribes). Second, there are the indirect savings that come from saving on travel costs if the client can avoid having to travel far to one or more government offices. Third, there is the additional income generated because the client spends less time away from work. Such savings will have a disproportionately beneficial impact on the poor since the costs and income-losses associated with accessing government data/services represent a much higher proportion of income than for better-off sections of the community. To access a single service, the poor often need to spend the equivalent of several days' income on fees and bribes, and spend the equivalent of one day's income on travel, and forego one day's income during the time it takes to go to government offices. eTransparency projects can therefore offer important financial benefits.
- Equality of treatment: in general, if a service is made more open and/or is automated, it becomes more consistent. This can represent a disproportionate benefit to poor and excluded citizens, who lack political and social capital, and can often find themselves the subject of harassment or even service refusal.
- Participation rates: if e-transparency projects can reduce the barriers to accessing government data/services, they can increase the participation rates from poor communities; perhaps (though as yet it is quite a big 'perhaps') enabling small businesses from those communities to be included in government procurement.
- Planning effectiveness: greater transparency about plans affecting poor communities, can enable those communities to understand more about the plans, and may encourage greater feedback on, and improvement to, the plans.
Implementation effectiveness: greater transparency about public works and related projects implemented in poor communities may increase the effectiveness of such projects.
Checklist of Problems and Design Responses for Poor Communities
The key problem faced by poor communities in relation to e-transparency (and other) projects is lack of resources. Poor communities (obviously) lack money. They also lack important competencies: literacy, computing skills, abilities to interpret data, knowledge about government processes, etc. More broadly, they lack political and social capital - the power and the connections to get heard and get results.
Design responses that have been used include the following:
- Data access: ensure that data is presented in languages used in the communities; ensure that data is presented in ways accessible to non-literate populations.
- Technology access: make use of technologies that are more pervasive in poor communities than the Web including radio/TV, cell phones, and kiosks.
- Technology intermediation: provide human intermediaries who can use ICTs on behalf of poor clients using set-ups such as call centres, walk-in centres, and staffed kiosks.
- Action intermediation: develop organisations that can access and use government information on behalf of the poor, for example, representing interests of the poor by holding public servants to account for their decisions and actions that affect poor communities. These could be community-based organisations, NGOs, or even government government itself.
- Financial sustainability: creating ICT-based systems that are both financially sustainable and based in poor communities has proven to be incredibly difficult. However, this issue must be addressed in project design.