From the Ground Up: Improving Government Performance with Independent Monitoring Organizations

Chapter 6: Disseminate and advocate

86 After discerning the problems with service delivery, and designing feasible solutions to those problems, the final step for independent monitoring organizations is to inform fellow citizens about their findings and persuade policymakers to implement their solutions. Chapters 2–5 have highlighted independent monitoring organizations’ ability to develop subtle understandings of problems with service delivery and to recommend useful solutions. This chapter deals with how independent monitoring organizations finally use their findings. Independent monitoring organizations can use results from their studies in two ways: disseminating their findings and recommendations and directly advocating for those recommendations. Dissemination seeks to influence the government by informing the public about problems with service delivery and creating public pressure for improvements. In disseminating their results, independent monitoring organizations’ usually focus on the users and providers of a service. Because independent monitoring organization analysts are also citizens, they often have an intuitive feel for how best to disseminate (and to whom) and can bring together the government officials, journalists, or nongovernment organization representatives most likely to productively use the findings. This intuitive understanding also helps independent monitoring organizations know when to go beyond reports and slideshows to present their results more creatively, in ways that capture local attention. This chapter presents several examples: a Ghanaian independent monitoring organization that used the media to ask political candidates hard questions and bring their answers to citizens, an Indian independent Disseminate and advocate Chapter 6 Disseminate and advocate 87 monitoring organization that produced a video to make public budgeting interesting and accessible to citizens, a Guatemalan organization that designed a pamphlet that presented its main findings to students and parents as an illustrated story, and a Paraguayan organization that described its education budget findings in a poster that schools in its study could put up in classrooms. These materials are appropriate and accessible to local citizens—written in the local vernacular and consistent with local norms and customs. This chapter also describes organizations in Poland and Albania that successfully disseminated their findings in more traditional ways—to the media and other civil society groups. In both cases the independent monitoring organizations’ local prestige and extensive network of contacts allowed them to bring a tremendous amount of public attention to their findings. Beyond simply disseminating findings, independent monitoring organizations can be more ambitious and directly advocate for service delivery improvements— and they do not have to do so by themselves. They can exert pressure through the media or get other civil society organizations on board to create broader pressure for change. But sometimes independent monitoring organizations go directly to the government—for example, when they believe their recommendations will be politically beneficial to the government. This chapter discusses a Guatemalan organization that found the government receptive to suggestions for fixing problems in the country’s otherwise successful and popular schooling programs. In other cases organizations can build collaborative relationships between analysts and government officials; several organizations sponsored by the Transparency and Accountability Project even involved government officials in their projects from the start. This helped the government view the findings as assets rather than threats, learn about previously unknown problems, and launch reforms or public inquiries. The results are impressive. At the time of writing, the organizations sponsored by the Transparency and Accountability Project had had only a few months to make their marks on public discourse and policy. By the time this book goes to print, their ongoing work will likely have led to much more. Caution must be used when gauging independent monitoring organizations’ effects on public policy. The real effects may not be known for years. And the work documented in this book is often only the beginning: many problems have to be discovered, then rediscovered, and rediscovered again and again before something is finally done about them. Yet despite these caveats, the independent monitoring organizations highlighted here have shown extraordinary potential for bringing about real improvements in service delivery in a remarkably short amount of time. 88 Chapter 6 Center for Democratic Development, Ghana The Center for Democratic Development’s (CDD) analysis of teacher absenteeism in Ghana provided compelling evidence of several diverse factors contributing to teacher absenteeism (see chapter 4), including several that invite relatively simple remedies (see chapter 5).1 CDD released its report in July 2008 using a strategy carefully calculated to draw public and media attention. It organized a series of media encounters...