Innovation in Public Sector Service Delivery: Lessons from Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

On the 5th of June 2019, I arrived in Abuja to sit on panels in a two-part Conference on Innovative Public Leadership in Nigeria, involving high-level deliberations with lawmakers and senior civil servants of the Federation. The conferences were spread over a week and themed `Repositioning Nigeria’s Public Service through Transformation and Innovation’. The first engagement was with members of the National Assembly followed by a two-day conference at the Public Service Institute of Nigeria. This was my first time traveling to another African country in a while. What better place to visit than the Giant of Africa?

I had been invited by a team of Nigerian public servants. I was under the USAID-sponsored Speaker Travel Grant for Mandela Washington Fellowship alumnus. The conferences are part of preliminary engagements for the establishment of the Mandela Center for Innovative Public Leadership in Nigeria. I was invited by virtue of my work at the Government of Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), the organizers had learnt of the great work DSTI does and were keen to have us share knowledge and experiences.

In Abuja, I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with, among others, Dr. Abel Achibgo, Clerk of the Committee on Arbitrations at the National Assembly and an academic at the Department of Management Sciences, University of Jos. In his remarks, Dr. Achigbo suggested inter alia, that one of the problems of innovation in government is that on a scale of preference, digitization, automation and eGovernance are low in priority to the Nigerian Government compared to pressing issues like security, health and education, which tend to dominate the agenda and take up the majority of fiscal space. In response, I posited that on the contrary, the Government of Sierra Leone (GoSL) does not consider innovation as a stand-alone initiative but rather, as a quest for marginal gains in the areas of priority service delivery – education, health the economy etc. I further stated that at DSTI, our flagship projects are aligned with the country’s National Development Plan and that the tools we develop are in collaboration with the relevant ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) with the goal of transferring ownership to the principal responsible agencies in due time. Furthermore, besides creating tools and designing systems that solve national problems and promote efficiency in public service delivery, DSTI uses state-of-the-art analytics to promote evidence-based planning and policymaking.

At the Public Service Institute, we deliberated on the apparent effect of Nigeria’s size and complex system of government on the slow pace of public service transformation. Dr. Martina Nwordu, Director, Special Projects Unit at the Federal Ministry of Labor and Employment stated that given the size of Nigeria and the apparent goal incongruence of multiple state agendas, it is hard to test and rollout innovative initiatives with a representative sample of states and at acceptable costs; according to her, this has led to many interventions dying upon trial rollouts in too few states. She also mentioned that the levels of appreciation for automation is not universal. Dr. Martina, however, promoted the need for more digitization and automation, highlighting the efficiency gains brought about by the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), launched in 2007 and its Human Resources module was launched in November 2016. The IPPIS has helped remove over 67,000 ghost workers from government payroll to date.

In my response to Dr. Nwordu, I stated that DSTI supports digitization across government and pushes for standard and consistent policies that promote eGovernance, eCommerce and a paperless, cashless society. In February 2019, DSTI Sierra Leone signed a three-year MoU with e-Governance Academy of Estonia (eGA). The eGA is a global leader for digital transformation for central and local governments. The MoU establishes technical collaboration on e-governance for public service delivery and administration in Sierra Leone. The two parties will develop policies and frameworks on digital identity, digital payments and government cloud solutions, targeting streamlining public service delivery and citizen engagement. The government further demonstrated its commitment when in early May 2019, a team of senior GoSL officials completed a week-long study tour at the eGA of Estonia to learn best practices that has informed and shaped Sierra Leone’s e-governance and digitization strategy. At the time of writing, DSTI is planning the launch of the National Innovation and Digitization Strategy (NIDS) (2019 – 2029) which groups strategic activities into seven categories, namely: (i) National Digital Identities (ii) Applied AI for Governance (iii) Infrastructure (iv) Cybersecurity (v) Entrepreneurship and Society (vi) Organizational Architecture. The NIDS cuts across the public sector and injects a culture of kaizen (continuous improvement) and reform.

DSTI’s approach to promoting digitalization and eGovernance is simple – to the extent that citizens can benefit from efficiency gains and streamlined governance systems that enhance citizen participation, public service delivery will be fused into ICT applications. In June 2019, Sierra Leone became the first country in Africa to fully digitize its national disease surveillance system, yes, first in Africa! In the same month, researchers partnering with DSTI, using geospatial mapping (of over 241 local courts from 149 chiefdoms) and digitized case files (including those over land reported between 2009 and 2018), presented to the President insights that will help promote access to justice across the country. This is in alignment with the UN SDG Goal 16 and with sub-cluster 4.5 Promoting Inclusive and Accountable Justice Institutions of the Medium-Term National Development Plan (2019-2023). We recognize that digitization and automation are not panaceas in themselves, so we do not pursue eGovernance for its own sake, rather, as the UN puts it, “… for a transformative role of the government towards cohesive, coordinated, and integrated processes and institutions through which such sustainable development takes place”. 

In response to the IPPIS example, I drew analogies to Sierra Leone, where the civil service payroll was digitized as far back as 2005 at the launch of the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS); the Human Resources module of which was implemented in April 2006. In my previous job supporting the Ministry of Health, I worked on a payroll audit of the Ministry in September 2017 that removed about 450 ghost workers, mostly fictitious low cadre nurses. The National Civil Registration Authority, upon conclusion of a biometric verification exercise of the civil service, revealed about 10,000 ghost workers in November 2018 and over 3,000 suspected in March 2019. Indeed, it is easier to track trends, compare turnover/productivity and audit systems when the subjects and variables are digitized. We need to digitize more!

At the National Assembly, the issue of resistance to change was also discussed. I noted that it is common in most African countries that the top cadres of public sector are predominantly held by quinquagenarian and sexagenarian men, often with low appetite for innovative systems strengthening. The remedy to resistance to change is a strong tone-at-the-top commitment to kaizen – more on tone-at-the-top later. It was agreed that across the civil service in both countries, there is an unarticulated preference for sticking with what “has been working just fine all these years”, especially among longstanding civil servants with institutional memory, who fear that automation and technology will erode their usefulness. In this regard, upon launching the HR Module of IPPIS in 2016, Winifred Oyo-Ita; the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation issued a directive that all civil servants must meet a certain level of computer competency to get promoted. I wish we could have such a clear-cut standard implemented in the Sierra Leone civil service.

In Abuja, I met with Directors of the National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), our discussions were around how they use or can use technology to enhance their work. By the end of the session, it was clear to me that one of their biggest challenges is a lack of systemic coordination with other related agencies – immigration, Interpol, local police and social welfare authorities. My point was that ideally, having information sharing memoranda of understanding is not enough, rather, systemic coordination can be fostered by having a shared database with live/real-time feeds, the lack of which leads to significant feedback lag and a degree of information asymmetry that impedes collaboration among agencies that ought to be concertedly fighting against the oh so important issue of human trafficking. 

On the issue of relative size difference, I am of the view that having a unitary system of government and a relatively small geographic and demographic size gives the Sierra Leone a comparative advantage regarding rollouts of civil service initiatives (e.g. IFMIS versus IPPIS rollouts). Also, although Sierra Leone does not have to deal with the goal incongruence of competing states as Nigeria, we also have a problem with coordination across agencies. For example, several MDAs have had problems aligning their payroll with the Civil Service Management System (CMS) HR module of IFMIS, leading to months of unpaid salaries. The World Bank, in its March 2018 Project Performance Assessment Report neatly spells out the challenges with using IFMIS and its ensuing negative effects in the general public sector. It is sadly the case in Sierra Leone that over the past years, there has been little effort in harnessing the full potential of such a powerful tool that has the capacity of providing seamless administration of public sector financial management. IFMIS is being underutilized as shown by the March 2018 World Bank Report on the Integrated Public Financial Management Reform Project. To date, the financial systems used to record, and process transactions installed in key institutions such as the Bank of Sierra Leone and the National Revenue Authority (NRA) are not interfaced with IFMIS. Also, the National Revenue Authority is only now rolling out its Integrated Tax Administration System (ITAS), after talk of a single integrated software appeared in NRA strategy documents as far back as 2013, even 2006. Collaboration is even poor among MDAs whose deliverables are path-dependent on the activities of others, for example, Corporate Affairs Commission (company registration), NRA and the Freetown City Council in no way share repositories. Information sharing is largely paper based via requests memos and minutes and by static file sharing. In most MDAs, when you hear the word ‘database’, it is likely a set of Microsoft Office format file in non-standardized templates. This, I was told by senior Nigerian civil servants, is the same in Nigeria.

The problem of inter-agency collaboration is not just a problem of low-income countries though, it applies to some of the countries with the most advanced eGovernance systems. The magnitude of this problem is highlighted by the findings of a 2016 survey by OECD which revealed that inter-agency coordination was viewed as the most pressing challenge faced by governments in fostering a culture of innovation and in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this regard, Infrastructure and Economic Competitiveness, the 4th pillar of the Government of Sierra Leone’s National Development Plan aligns with SDG 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; to this end DSTI works on a platform for financial data architecture – embedded automated financial tools deployed within relevant MDAs; more on this later.

In all my engagements at the National Assembly and the Public Service Institute there was common thread of challenges faced by both countries, albeit to different degrees. Some of the problems limiting eGovernance, automation and digitization in both countries include:

·        Low human capital (illiteracy) – more on this below

·        Infrastructure limitations – power and ICT

·        Lack of genuine government commitment to transformation towards a leaner and efficient public sector. This point does not hold true with the current political dispensation in Sierra Leone as the President Julius Maada Bio has displayed great commitment to promoting innovation in Government as discussed below. It is however worth noting that the neglect of previous governments has had its toll on our readiness today.

·        Resource constraints – low fiscal space and more urgent public expenditure needs.

New Public Management

In both events, there was talk of New Public Management (NPM) which is a 21st Century phenomenon that fuses conventional public policymaking with entrepreneurial and managerial concepts including innovation, customer-oriented, value for money (effectiveness, efficiency and economy) in the delivery of public services. There was a consensus across the panel that for African countries to fully adopt NPM, there must be a top-down leadership buy-in. To this extent, Julius Maada Bio, the President of Sierra Leone is praised as a visionary, for not just establishing DSTI, but also adopting the Directorate to his office. To put this in context, it so happens that in many African countries, there is no single government agency charged with the mandate of promoting development through ST&I, rather, the function is fragmented across various independent institutions that do not necessarily collaborate well.

In Nigeria, SERVICOM is the federal agency responsible for monitoring the performance of MDAs in the Country, to conduct regular evaluation and ratings of service delivery level to measure excellence and to report and recommend sanctions and penalties for MDAs found wanting. Interestingly, every MDA has a SERVICOM Unit headed by a Nodal Officer (usually a Director) and supported by 3 staff (a Charter Desk Officer, a Customer Relations/Complaints Officer and a Service Improvement Desk Officer) – all appointed from regular staff of the respected MDA. The MDA’s SERVICOM-vetted Service Charter is to be displayed at conspicuous places where the customers could easily read and know their rights to good service. They measure, timeliness, professionalism, information and staff attitude. Interestingly, they also notice the physical (non-verbal) communication that indicates that the staff is happy to give service. MDA’s compliance is ranked on the SERVICOM Index.

At the Public Service Institute (PSI), I made a presentation on some of DSTI’s flagship projects and explained how they enhance public service delivery. The panel and audience were particularly fascinated by the following five:

·        Integrated GIS Solution, an integrated and interactive Geographic Information System platform for national assets, service facilities, and citizen resources. It is a mapping resource for planning and national investments that visualizes GoSL and partner assets for health and education services; represent financial service locations for financial inclusion; maps connectivity and data access at a national level; enable citizen engagement for real-time, ground-truth data input and feedback on service status etc.

·        National Financial Data Services Mapping which enables an integrated national revenue and expense platform – a national financial data architecture with embedded automated financial tools deployed within relevant MDAs. This will allow for triangulation of financial data and support tracking payments (Bank Switch) and for developing new ways of revenue collection with technology that improves on effective and efficient governance; it will also provide, and support increased digital financial services for citizens.

·        Extending our work on service delivery to a broader spectrum, I also shared our work on improving Sierra Leone’s Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) ranking. The EoDB project at DSTI is an integrated and coordinated initiative for facilitating an effective and transparent business environment in Sierra Leone. We use business process mapping, cloud services, process digitization, visualization toolkits and app designs that will promote streamlining essential public-private interaction. Our EoDB project is done in close consultation with entrepreneurs and policymakers.

·        USSD GoSL Mobile Services: A deployed service and citizen engagement solution to support human capital development. USSD services for health, education, justice, and other government services accessible to all citizens.

·        Government of Sierra Leone Education Data Hub – more on this later

As shown above, Nigeria uses a form of self-assessment - having four in-house staff serve as SERVICOM representatives. In Sierra Leone, the key agencies in the public sector management are the Public Service Commission and the Human Resource Management Office. However, in the drive to foster New Public Management, the agency charged with the National Agenda of “strengthening and repositioning the civil service” is the Public Sector Reform Unit (PSRU). PSRU “focuses on outcomes, efficiency, performance and a leaner workforce in the management of the Public/Civil Service environs” and has been doing so since its formation in 2007. In both Sierra Leone and Nigeria, standards of service delivery appear in the service charters of various MDAs, complimenting the national civil service codes of conduct. While the civil service codes of conduct are long-term and generic, the above approaches are the nations’ attempt at New Public Management. What DSTI does in relation to this, create tools and systems that will enable improved service delivery, data generation, processing and seamless information sharing.

Education, Democracy etc.

I arrived in Abuja on the day of Eid al-Fitr. On our way from the airport there were huge crowds of people along the street corners and on parks and open spaces mainly dressed in conservative Muslim attires. I was telling my host of how excited I was to be in Nigeria and was giving him a rundown of some of my favorite Nigerian personalities, including M.I. Abaga, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and Falz. Upon hearing me mention Lamido Sanusi, he asked me what I know of him. I responded saying it was upon reading a Lamido Sanusi Financial Times interview one cold night in December 2009 in London that I decided he is the kind of person I want to be like. I admired his leadership as Central Bank Governor and followed closely the reforms for which he was highly acclaimed. I then changed my course of study from Accounting to Risk Management – following the expertise of Lamido. At this point, my host pointed out the window on to the crowds of people, mostly teenagers and said “these are Lamido Sanusi’s people – they are from the North… they are orthodox Muslims not so concerned with Western Education. Their population is huge. Girls get married off at a young age…”. Seeing the shock on my face, he stopped and laughed, as if he had suddenly realized he was badmouthing his country to a stranger. 

Despite primary school education being ‘officially’ free in Nigeria, Nigeria is home to world’s largest population of out-of-school. This problem is particularly rife in Northern Nigeria where also, almost two-thirds of students are functionally illiterate. Contrasting this with Sierra Leone where the President launched the Free Quality Education initiative a month after he was elected, I cannot help but ponder on the detriments of having a large uneducated young population whose life chances are rendered unfortunate by deprivation from education, Western Education. In his defense however, Lamido Sanusi the Emir of Kano has over the past three years, been calling for the conversion of Mosques into schools – this is in addition to his vehement promotion of education for his people. An illiterate and ignorant population is dangerous for the public service and a threat to our democracy. How?

In my talks at both the National Assembly and the Public Service Institute, I was sure to emphasize on the need for innovation and systems strengthening in essential public service delivery, particularly education and health. The GoSL’s Medium Term Development Plan 2019-2023 has Human Capital Development (HCD) as its first Pilar. HCD is not just of paramount concern to GoSL because of its obvious consequential benefits (educated, healthy and a well-fed population) but also, because sound human capital is a key determinant of the quality of our democracy. To explain this better, let us visit ancient Greece, the civilization that gave rise to modern-day democracy and philosophy.

In explaining his preference for an intellectual democracy over universal adult suffrage, Socrates in his discussions with Adeimantus, emphasized the importance of an informed and educated voter population capable of sound reasoning. He was proven right when in 399 BC, a jury of unsophisticated Athenians decided by a narrow majority that he was guilty and consequently put to death over phony charges of ‘corrupting the youth’.

I would extend Socrates reasoning and say Africans should, we should stop voting for leaders who have not shown a track record of sound judgement prudent decision-making, particularly on improving the human capacity development.

Lamido Sanusi puts it best when in October 2018 he said:

We have to take an interest in the quality of our leaders and representatives, in the level of education. If you look around this country, at many levels of leadership, we have elected, and we have chosen to elect people who do not have an education. And because they are not educated, they cannot give education. We need to lay more emphasis on the quality of people we elect to executive and legislative offices and we need to make sure that those to whom we entrust policy are themselves educated and know the value of education. Let us invest more in education and let us give up some of the privileges that we have, such as the trillions we are spending subsiding petroleum products. That money should go into educating our young people. We are spending too much money on roads and bridges and trains and too little money on educating our children. Let us educate these young people and they will build the roads, trains and the bridges. We do not need to invite the Chinese to do that for us. I do understand sometimes that if a governor does not build roads or bridges, he is seen as not having performed by the people. We build all these highways and there are more pedestrians on the highways than cars and those pedestrians are most often people without education and help. Development is first and foremost about people.

Although I do not recommend the model of intellectual suffrage Socrates advocated, I believe it is imperative that we improve access to free and quality education across sub-Saharan Africa with ‘free’ and ‘quality’ holding equal weights. It is in this spirit that the Government of Julius Maada Bio, just four months into his presidency launched took on the Free Quality Education Program that covers tuition fees for students, providing textbooks, books, pens and pencils, sports equipment, rehabilitation of schools, provision of furniture, and the commencement of the school feeding program.

Given that our governments operate under resource constraints and strive for optimal budget allocation, it is imperative that policymaking on public service delivery is evidence-based. It is further important that what is ‘free’, given the fiscal commitment, is tracked and audited using robust technology and analytics. In this regard, DSTI, upon inception, took on the design of the Government of Sierra Leone Education Data Hub which is an exploratory interactive data visualization tool based around education data. This tool is being used by policymakers to generate hypothesis, understand the status of various variables and inputs and ensure policy and interventions on education are evidence-based. Furthermore, this tool will provide insights about the key drivers of school performance and generally promote the assurance of quality education across the country. A module is also being designed for use by the general public.

Finally and Most Importantly: Government Buy-in and Setting the Tone at the Top

Transformational change in the civil service and in public service delivery requires genuine commitment from the center of government and the determination to follow through to the implementation of ambitious and innovative projects with the financial backing and leadership discipline required for sustainable success.

The time to start digitization is past, long ago, so low-income countries should be in a hurry to catch up with the rest of the world, save cost and benefit from efficiency gains. It takes thousands of man hours of data collection and applied analytics to digitize public sector/service delivery and automate systems and processes. Case in point Government of Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), where I witness first-hand, smart and hardworking data scientists do data mining, fact-checking and cross referencing, hypothesis testing and rigorous analytics on baseline data that ought to have been collected and cleaned over the years. The moral of the story is, the sooner countries digitize, the shorter lead time e-governance projects and initiatives will have. I have a hard time explaining to friends in Freetown the herculean nature of promoting science and technology and innovation (ST&I) in a country that has not taken ST&I seriously in the past. When the historical data is nonexistent or bad, the foundation/baseline is poor so when eventually an agency like DSTI is set up for the first time, their work starts with strengthening that foundation.

It has been shown convincingly, in a World Bank report, that top-down directive leadership is probably the most important factor for improved public sector performance. Rwandese district mayors improved significantly in innovative service delivery matrix when the President’s Office offered performance based non-monetary incentives for reaching their targets. Sticking with incentives, the Ministry of Finance in Zimbabwe records improvements in medical supply chains and primary education indicators by giving incentives for better inter-agency information sharing. Armenia is strengthening evidence-based policymaking by using an integrated Regulatory Impact Assessment – a kind of input-output model for public policy. Inter-agency collaboration led to efficiency gains in Malaysia when the Office of the President adapted a management consulting approach to break down bottlenecks in coordination.

The Nigerian officials were fascinated by the work of DSTI, the trajectory and sense of purpose in our approach to solving national problems. I credit the progress of our work to the amazing commitment of President Julius Maada Bio and the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO), Dr. Moinina David Sengeh. I truly believe that if DSTI was born out of any less persons than the President and CIO, we would have been stifled by the bureaucracies of government, the cynicism of stakeholders resistant to change and the burn-out that comes from driving at low RPM on the 5th gear. Indeed, Sierra Leone is blessed with visionary leadership and there is no limit to the great things we will go on to do.

In conclusion, it takes us - everyday citizens - to nurture a culture of continuous improvement. Innovation is not just about new technologies and automation, it is about improving on the way we do things, everyday things. We innovate by imitation, adaptation and invention.