Government at a Glance 2019

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Government at a Glance provides reliable, internationally comparative data on government activities and their results in OECD countries. Where possible, it also reports data for Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and South Africa. In many public governance areas, it is the only available source of data. It includes input, process, output and outcome indicators as well as contextual information for each country.

The 2019 edition includes input indicators on public finance and employment; while processes include data on institutions, budgeting practices and procedures, human resources management, regulatory government, public procurement and digital government and open data. Outcomes cover core government results (e.g. trust, inequality reduction) and indicators on access, responsiveness, quality and citizen satisfaction for the education, health and justice sectors.

Governance indicators are especially useful for monitoring and benchmarking governments’ progress in their public sector reforms.Each indicator in the publication is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of graphs and/or charts illustrating variations across countries and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological section on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability….(More)”.

Kenya passes data protection law crucial for tech investments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

George Obulutsa and Duncan Miriri at Reuters: “Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Friday approved a data protection law which complies with European Union legal standards as it looks to bolster investment in its information technology sector.

The East African nation has attracted foreign firms with innovations such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa mobile money services, but the lack of safeguards in handling personal data has held it back from its full potential, officials say.

“Kenya has joined the global community in terms of data protection standards,” Joe Mucheru, minister for information, technology and communication, told Reuters.

The new law sets out restrictions on how personally identifiable data obtained by firms and government entities can be handled, stored and shared, the government said.

Mucheru said it complies with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation which came into effect in May 2018 and said an independent office will investigate data infringements….

A lack of data protection legislation has also hampered the government’s efforts to digitize identity records for citizens.

The registration, which the government said would boost its provision of services, suffered a setback this year when the exercise was challenged in court.

“The lack of a data privacy law has been an enormous lacuna in Kenya’s digital rights landscape,” said Nanjala Nyabola, author of a book on information technology and democracy in Kenya….(More)”.

Voting could be the problem with democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernd Reiter at The Conversation: “Around the globe, citizens of many democracies are worried that their governments are not doing what the people want.

When voters pick representatives to engage in democracy, they hope they are picking people who will understand and respond to constituents’ needs. U.S. representatives have, on average, more than 700,000 constituents each, making this task more and more elusive, even with the best of intentions. Less than 40% of Americans are satisfied with their federal government.

Across Europe, South America, the Middle East and China, social movements have demanded better government – but gotten few real and lasting results, even in those places where governments were forced out.

In my work as a comparative political scientist working on democracy, citizenship and race, I’ve been researching democratic innovations in the past and present. In my new book, “The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead: Alternatives to Political Representation and Capitalism,” I explore the idea that the problem might actually be democratic elections themselves.

My research shows that another approach – randomly selecting citizens to take turns governing – offers the promise of reinvigorating struggling democracies. That could make them more responsive to citizen needs and preferences, and less vulnerable to outside manipulation….

For local affairs, citizens can participate directly in local decisions. In Vermont, the first Tuesday of March is Town Meeting Day, a public holiday during which residents gather at town halls to debate and discuss any issue they wish.

In some Swiss cantons, townspeople meet once a year, in what are called Landsgemeinden, to elect public officials and discuss the budget.

For more than 30 years, communities around the world have involved average citizens in decisions about how to spend public money in a process called “participatory budgeting,” which involves public meetings and the participation of neighborhood associations. As many as 7,000 towns and cities allocate at least some of their money this way.

The Governance Lab, based at New York University, has taken crowd-sourcing to cities seeking creative solutions to some of their most pressing problems in a process best called “crowd-problem solving.” Rather than leaving problems to a handful of bureaucrats and experts, all the inhabitants of a community can participate in brainstorming ideas and selecting workable possibilities.

Digital technology makes it easier for larger groups of people to inform themselves about, and participate in, potential solutions to public problems. In the Polish harbor city of Gdansk, for instance, citizens were able to help choose ways to reduce the harm caused by flooding….(More)”.

A Constitutional Right to Public Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chad G. Marzen: “In the wake of the 2013 United States Supreme Court decision of McBurney v. Young (569 U.S. 221), this Article calls for policymakers at the federal and state levels to ensure governmental records remain open and accessible to the public. It urges policymakers to call not only for strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act and the various state public records law, but to pursue an amendment to the United States Constitution providing a right to public information.

This Article proposes a draft of such an amendment:

The right to public information, being a necessary and vital part of democracy, shall be a fundamental right of the people. The right of the people to inspect and/or copy records of government, and to be provided notice of and attend public meetings of government, shall not unreasonably be restricted.

This Article analyzes the benefits of the amendment and concludes the enshrining of the right to public information in both the United States Constitution as well as various state constitutions will ensure greater access of public records and documents to the general public, consistent with the democratic value of open, transparent government….(More)”.

Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age

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Book edited by Ashu M. G. Solo: “Technology and particularly the Internet have caused many changes in the realm of politics. Aspects of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science can be applied to politics. Politicians and candidates use their own websites and social network profiles to get their message out. Revolutions in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have started in large part due to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networking has also played a role in protests and riots in numerous countries. The mainstream media no longer has a monopoly on political commentary as anybody can set up a blog or post a video online. Now, political activists can network together online.

The Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age is a pivotal reference source that serves to increase the understanding of methods for politics in the computer age, the effectiveness of these methods, and tools for analyzing these methods. The book includes research chapters on different aspects of politics with information technology, engineering, computer science, or math, from 27 researchers at 20 universities and research organizations in Belgium, Brazil, Cape Verde, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, and the United States of America. Highlighting topics such as online campaigning and fake news, the prospective audience includes, but is not limited to, researchers, political and public policy analysts, political scientists, engineers, computer scientists, political campaign managers and staff, politicians and their staff, political operatives, professors, students, and individuals working in the fields of politics, e-politics, e-government, new media and communication studies, and Internet marketing….(More)”.

African countries are missing the data needed to drive development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Pilling at the Financial Times: “When statisticians decided to track how well African countries were doing in moving towards their 2030 UN sustainable development goals, they discovered a curious thing: no one had the faintest idea. More accurately, on average, African governments keep statistics covering only about a third of the relevant data. To be fair, the goals, which range from eradicating poverty and hunger to creating sustainable cities and communities, are overly complicated and sometimes unquantifiable.

The millennium development goals that they superseded had eight goals with 21 indicators. The SDGs have 17, with 232 indicators. Yet statisticians for the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which compiled the report, are on to something. African states don’t know enough about their people. 

In this age of mass surveillance, that might seem counterintuitive. Surely governments, not to mention private companies, have too much information on their citizenry? In fact, in many African nations with weak states, big informal economies and undocumented communities, the problem is the reverse. How many people are there in Nigeria? What is the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe? How many people in Kibera, a huge informal settlement in Nairobi, have access to healthcare? The answers to such basic questions are: we don’t really know.  Nigeria last conducted a census in 2006, when the population — a sensitive topic in which religion, regionalism and budget allocations are messily intertwined — came out at 140m. These days it could be 180m or 200m. Or perhaps more. Or less.

President Muhammadu Buhari recently complained that statistics quoted by international bodies, such as those alleging that Nigeria has more people living in absolute poverty than India, were “wild estimates” bearing “little relation to facts on the ground”. The riposte to that is simple. Work out what is happening and do something about it. Likewise, unemployment is hard to define, let alone quantify, in a broken economy such as Zimbabwe’s where cited jobless statistics range from 5 to 95 per cent. Is a struggling subsistence farmer or a street-side hawker jobless or gainfully employed?

For that matter what is the status of a government employee who receives her salary in a useless electronic currency?  According to Seth Berkley, chief executive of the Vaccine Alliance, keeping tabs on unregistered people in the sprawling “slums” of Africa’s increasingly massive megacities, is harder than working out what is going on in isolated villages. If governments do not know whether a person exists it is all too easy to ignore their rights — to healthcare, to education or to the vote. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation found that only eight countries in Africa register more than 90 per cent of births. Tens of millions of people are literally invisible. Mr Ibrahim, a Sudanese billionaire, calls data “the missing SDG”….(More)”

Data gaps threaten achievement of development goals in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sara Jerving at Devex: “Data gaps across the African continent threaten to hinder the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s first governance report released on Tuesday.

The report, “Agendas 2063 & 2030: Is Africa On Track?“ based on an analysis of the foundation’s Ibrahim index of African governance, found that since the adoption of both of these agendas, the availability of public data in Africa has declined. With data focused on social outcomes, there has been a notable decline in education, population and vital statistics, such as birth and death records, which allow citizens to access public services.

The index, on which the report is based, is the most comprehensive dataset on African governance, drawing on ten years of data of all 54 African nations. An updated index is released every two years….

The main challenge in the production of quality, timely data, according to the report, is a lack of funding and lack of independence of the national statistical offices.

Only one country, Mauritius, had a perfect score in terms of independence of its national statistics office – meaning that its office can collect the data it chooses, publish without approval from other arms of the government, and is sufficiently funded. Fifteen African nations scored zero in terms of the independence of their offices….(More)”.

How to ensure that your data science is inclusive

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Samhir Vasdev: “As a new generation of data scientists emerges in Africa, they will encounter relatively little trusted, accurate, and accessible data upon which to apply their skills. It’s time to acknowledge the limitations of the data sources upon which data science relies, particularly in lower-income countries.

The potential of data science to support, measure, and amplify sustainable development is undeniable. As public, private, and civic institutions around the world recognize the role that data science can play in advancing their growth, an increasingly robust array of efforts has emerged to foster data science in lower-income countries.

This phenomenon is particularly salient in Sub-Saharan Africa. There, foundations are investing millions into building data literacy and data science skills across the continent. Multilaterals and national governments are pioneering new investments into data science, artificial intelligence, and smart cities. Private and public donors are building data science centers to build cohorts of local, indigenous data science talent. Local universities are launching graduate-level data science courses.

Despite this progress, among the hype surrounding data science rests an unpopular and inconvenient truth: As a new generation of data scientists emerges in Africa, they will encounter relatively little trusted, accurate, and accessible data that they can use for data science.

We hear promises of how data science can help teachers tailor curricula according to students’ performances, but many school systems don’t collect or track that performance data with enough accuracy and timeliness to perform those data science–enabled tweaks. We believe that data science can help us catch disease outbreaks early, but health care facilities often lack the specific data, like patient origin or digitized information, that is needed to discern those insights.

These fundamental data gaps invite the question: Precisely what data would we perform data science on to achieve sustainable development?…(More)”.

Why policy networks don’t work (the way we think they do)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by James Georgalakis: “Is it who you know or what you know? The literature on evidence uptake and the role of communities of experts mobilised at times of crisis convinced me that a useful approach would be to map the social network that emerged around the UK-led mission to Sierra Leone so it could be quantitatively analysed. Despite the well-deserved plaudits for my colleagues at IDS and their partners in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Wellcome Trust and elsewhere, I was curious to know why they had still met real resistance to some of their policy advice. This included the provision of home care kits for victims of the virus who could not access government or NGO run Ebola Treatment Units (ETUs).

It seemed unlikely these challenges were related to poor communications. The timely provision of accessible research knowledge by the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform has been one of the most celebrated aspects of the mobilisation of anthropological expertise. This approach is now being replicated in the current Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  Perhaps the answer was in the network itself. This was certainly indicated by some of the accounts of the crisis by those directly involved.

Social network analysis

I started by identifying the most important looking policy interactions that took place between March 2014, prior to the UK assuming leadership of the Sierra Leone international response and mid-2016, when West Africa was finally declared Ebola free. They had to be central to the efforts to coordinate the UK response and harness the use of evidence. I then looked for documents related to these events, a mixture of committee minutes, reports and correspondence , that could confirm who was an active participant in each. This analysis of secondary sources related to eight separate policy processes and produced a list of 129 individuals. However, I later removed a large UK conference that took place in early 2016 at which learning from the crisis was shared.  It appeared that most delegates had no significant involvement in giving policy advice during the crisis. This reduced the network to 77….(More)”.

Urban Slums in a Datafying Milieu: Challenges for Data-Driven Research Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bijal Brahmbhatt et al: “With the ongoing trend of urban datafication and growing use of data/evidence to shape developmental initiatives by state as well as non-state actors, this exploratory case study engages with the complex and often contested domains of data use. This study uses on-the-ground experience of working with informal settlements in Indian cities to examine how information value chains work in practice and the contours of their power to intervene in building an agenda of social justice into governance regimes. Using illustrative examples from ongoing action-oriented projects of Mahila Housing Trust in India such as the Energy Audit Project, Slum Mapping Exercise and women-led climate resilience building under the Global Resilience Partnership, it raises questions about challenges of making effective linkages between data, knowledge and action in and for slum communities in the global South by focussing on two issues.

First, it reveals dilemmas of achieving data accuracy when working with slum communities in developing cities where populations are dynamically changing, and where digitisation and use of ICT has limited operational currency. The second issue focuses on data ownership. It foregrounds the need for complementary inputs and the heavy requirement for support systems in informal settlements in order to translate data-driven knowledge into actionable forms. Absence of these will blunt the edge of data-driven community participation in local politics. Through these intersecting streams, the study attempts to address how entanglements between southern urbanism, datafication, governance and social justice diversify the discourse on data justice. It highlights existing hurdles and structural hierarchies within a data-heavy developmental register emergent across multiple cities in the global South where data-driven governmental regimes interact with convoluted urban forms and realities….(More)”.