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E f f e c t i v e a n d a c c o u n t a b l e s e r v i c e d e l i v e r y India Initiative: SWAVALAMBAN Institution: District Administration, Dhanbad The initiative improved disbursement of pensions in the district of Dhanbad. Before the implementation of the SWAVALAMBAN initiative, the largely manual process of disbursement in the payment of pensions – in particular the registration of new pensioners – was very cumbersome, inefficient and tedious, as well as lacking transparency and involving a lot of paperwork. A pensioner had to wait days, weeks or months and sometimes had to pay bribes to get entitlements. It used to take about three months to complete one cycle, therefore disbursement of monthly pensions was not done on a monthly basis, violating the order passed by the Supreme Court of India. The system was also riddled with corruption, with a number of fictitious pensioners on the system and retention of pensioners who had long passed on. The initiative has cut down the time from three months to a maximum of three days through automating payment and the creation of direct cash transfers into pensioners’ bank accounts. Payment through business correspondents in remote rural areas has dramatically improved the delivery of services. In addition, the database of all pensioners was digitised with the help of newly developed software. Monitoring at district and government level has been simplified, making it only a mouse click away. For promoting whole-of-government approaches in the information age Nigeria Initiative: 1-GOV.net Institution: Galaxy Backbone The federal government was spending over US$120 million on ICT infrastructure projects championed by different ministries, departments or agencies (MDAs). Most of these projects were duplications. At the same time valuable information created in one MDA was not accessible to the next. Overall, there was lack of a co-ordinated approach to e-government. The federal government was receiving little value for money while paying a high price for the connectivity services: about $6.7 million a year for what was no more than a total of 50 mbps to different MDAs. In addition, the security of information was at risk with government data being hosted in several open access infrastructures offshore. A common ICT platform for the federal government was proposed by an inter-ministerial committee on harmonisation of ICT initiatives of all MDAs and approved by the President of Nigeria. This common platform, called 1-GOV.net, has now become a secure government cloud consisting of software, hardware and network infrastructure, offering shared services to the whole of the federal government. Now, over 85 per cent of the MDAs are integrated into a secure, exclusive network. For example, inter-agency voice and video conferencing is now available through 3,600 connected locations nationwide, reducing the need to travel across and between the cities for meetings. The initiative eliminated the duplication of ICT projects and infrastructure within government, reducing costs and improving efficiency. Botswana Initiative: Food coupon system Institution: Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development Botswana faced the problem of an inefficient food distribution programme to provide monthly food rations to its approximately 103,000 beneficiaries from low-income groups across the country. The process of distribution was cumbersome: local councils would publish tenders and contract local merchants on a yearly basis to provide food rations on a particular day every month. Social workers were delegated the task of overseeing the process, taking significant amounts of time away from performing their core functions. Beneficiaries would gather in long queues, causing the food collection to become an undignified and demeaning process. Council accounts departments found themselves over-burdened with the administrative processing of the monthly bills from the merchants. Merchants in turn would face delays in payments, prompting increased prices on food rations. Other merchants supplied poor quality products including expired foods. The system was also open to corruption and abused by so-called ‘ghost beneficiaries’. The solution is a biometrically-driven smart card system which utilises a nationwide network of point of sale devices that are all connected to a central switch which processes the transactions. The card enables beneficiaries to buy food at pre-approved merchants anywhere in the country, eliminating the need to collect food for the whole month in a single day as the previous system required. Participating merchants undergo a stringent process to ensure quality of the products. Through SmartSwitch, the need for annual tenders was eliminated thus releasing local council staff from an undue administrative burden. Beneficiaries no longer suffer the indignity of having to queue up in a demeaning manner but can now purchase food items whenever they choose. Merchants now receive their payments within 48 hours of the sale. Costs were saved as only about 70,000 persons out of the previous 103,000 beneficiaries registered for the new fingerprint-based system. Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14 84


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