View Point                                                                         Abid Ullah Jan

A Project Worth Replication

One of the many misfortunes of developing countries is the missed opportunities of scaling up and replicating successful donors-funded models of local development. District Citizen Information Centre, the epicenter of a model Community Information System by UNICEF, has become one such example in Pakistan.
Very few of the many models tried actually succeed. The successful idea of developing a Community Information System (CIS) in District Mardan predates the present government’s plan to devolve power to Local Government. It, however, has become one of the main supporting projects to the devolution plan.
The main objective was to empower communities and citizens with the knowledge of critical socio-economic conditions that affect their lives as well as availability and utilization of district resources. This was made possible through the development of a cohesive and integrated system at the community level, which periodically gathers primary data on various development indicators related to health, education, sanitation and other sectors related local development, and passes it on to the Union Council and District levels for district planner, managers and stakeholders.
On the District level, data from the various scattered secondary sources of information will be merged with the primary data. The community will also benefit from the processed information through using it for developing, executing and monitoring local development plans.
District Citizen Information Centre (DCIC) is the epicenter of the CIS, which serves as the information hub to which line departments and other sources will provide and obtain information. Computerized processing of information takes place at DCIC.
The web site of DCIC in Mardan indicates that an organized system is in place for assisting district planners. This is a unique model that other districts need to implement with full assistance of the central government because external funding agencies are agents of change after all. They are there only to develop and pretest a model for the government and people to scale up.
The irony is that instead of owning and replicating the said project, there are some vital aspects of the main idea that are missing simply due to government’s living with the 18th century mentality.
The data gathered so painfully is available only in tabular form. Development of Geographic Information System to visualize the information even for a lay man is missing. The reason: The government believes data projection on simple maps, showing district and UC boundaries will endanger our security, forgetting that those who can pose a threat to Pakistan’s security are the real owners of these maps. The project borrows just the boundary lines from these high resolution maps.
Not allowing a development project to visually represent the available data over the area maps means depriving its own people and the local government of a vital means to development. It will also deny access to wider audience through internet because not everyone can sit and make sense out of the loads of tabular data for himself.
The idea was to visualized the available data for enabling Village and Union Councilors to simply click on these sectoral-maps and not only get the respective information — say finding the real need of establishing a school or a drinking water facility in a locality — but also compare his Union Council with the rest of Union Councils to see how it is ferrying along in the struggle for development.
Another aspect of the project that needs to specific attention is the primary information collection system at the community level that ensures timely and accurate information availability to DCIC. Without this core component, DCIC will be reduced to the furniture and fine computer equipment at best.
Community’s involvement in information collection on core indicators, agreed by the information users, under the supervision and assistance of the local government officials is the only way to Institutionalising this system.
Institutionalization takes time and UNICEF will definitely work on this aspect in the coming year or so in District Mardan. What we need on the local, provincial and central government levels is a study of this project for replication in other districts of the country with slight fine tuning of the additional, area-specific development indicators.
The beauty of the project is that it is extremely cost effective and when implemented in its real spirit, it will provide enormous assistance in targeted poverty alleviation, health, sanitation and agriculture development programmes.
Besides cost effectiveness of future development projects, an established CIS with DCIC at its core will not only reduce the chances of any duplication of efforts on the part of development programmes but will also minimize the risk of planning on the basis of unreliable data.
The government has to prove that the ownership of projects is not judged by accepting its hard and soft components as long as the donors’ funds are flowing in. Ownership is judged only through serious intellectual and financial contribution, and replication of successful projects for the benefit of all in the country.