Pluses of the ‘Citizens’ Report Card’ concept

Lionel WIJESIRI

Asia Foundation in collaboration with local stakeholders recently introduced the Citizens Report Card concept as a pilot project in Sri Lanka. This is a step in the right direction. This social accountability tool, once fully functional, will cover the space for developing recommendations on sector policies, strategies, and programmes to address institutional constraints and improve service delivery.

In common usage, a ‘Report Card’ communicates a student’s performance. A typical report card uses a grading scale to determine the quality of a student's school work. In the same way, the Citizen Report Card (CRC) is a simple but powerful tool to provide public bodies with systematic feedback from users of public services. The concept originated in 1994 in Bangalore, India, through the work of an independent NGO - the Public Affairs Centre. Since then it has grown as a widely applied tool by the governments across the globe.

The guiding principle behind CRC is to introduce market-type incentives to the functioning of public services. Unlike private sector companies that have to ensure customer satisfaction in a competitive environment to survive, public bodies are often monopolies facing almost no competition and consequently lack incentive to be responsive citizens’ needs.

Critical themes

In that sense, CRC is not just another public opinion survey; rather, it is a collective reflection of citizens’ feedback on the performance of a public service provider, shaped by their experience of having actually used a particular service for a length of time. Its strength is its ability to quantify the user feedback using a representative sample.

By collecting feedback on the quality and adequacy of public services from actual users, CRC provides a rigorous basis and a proactive agenda for communities and civil society organization to engage in a dialogue with service providers to improve the delivery of public services.

The CRC addresses mainly the critical themes in the delivery of public services like water, sanitation, health, education, Police, among others, or scores on different performance criteria of a given service, such as availability, access, quality and reliability. It also addresses the problems encountered by users of services and responsiveness of service providers in addressing these problems.

The transparency in service provisions and costs incurred in using a service including hidden costs such as bribes are also addressed. The CRC, in essence, provides a summative satisfaction score that captures the totality of critical service-related parameters. The findings thus present a collective quantitative measure of overall satisfaction and quality of services over an array of indicators. This information is then used to design and lobby improvements.

Requirements

The World Bank cites five crucial requirements for an effective CRC initiative: (1) a commitment to gather credible data on clients’ perceptions; (2) constructive and solution-oriented approach rather than confrontational advocacy; (3) competence, professionalism and credibility of the group that undertakes the CRC exercise; (4) commitment by the public bodies to engage in the process, listen to critical analysis and initiate reformative action based on the findings; and (5) active involvement of the mass media to ensure that the findings are widely disseminated and debated.

The concept of citizen feedback surveys to assess the performance of public service is fast gaining wide acceptance. The responses to Report Cards indicate impact at four levels:

1. Stimulating Reforms: CRC studies clearly bring to light wide array of issues, both quantitative and qualitative that send strong signals to public service providers. The use of a rating scale permits the respondents to quantify the extent of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the service of a public body, as well as different dimensions of its service.

2. Activating Stakeholder Responsiveness: The CRC findings could be used by a public body as a diagnostic tool to trigger off further studies and internal reforms. These findings help senior leadership to monitor effectiveness of administration across wide areas, in a simple and direct manner, free of technical details. For administrators and planners, it provides insights into aspects of service delivery where greater care, supervision and investment may be required.

3. Raising Public Awareness: The CRC findings are always placed in the public domain, and disseminated widely through the media.

Needless to say, specific findings and the novelty of the method used, make it useful and attractive for the media.

Since issues of weak public service come up from time to time, the media as well as researchers link it to Report Card findings, and use the valid and reliable base for raising issues and proposing change.

4. Mobilization of state-public partnerships: Seminars and meetings are an integral part of disseminating CRC findings, and involve both government officials and representatives of civil society organizations and NGOs. Report Cards gave this critical segment a handy tool to focus on issues of concern and stimulated them to move from subjective issues to facts and figures while requesting public service bodies for specific improvements in priority areas.

It also will provide these groups with an opportunity to understand the constraints under which public service providers` function, and explore options for community initiatives for problem solving.

Methodology

The writer recently had an opportunity in going through a CRC project report prepared the stakeholders in an Asian developing country as an attempt to explore international best practices in their public service delivery reform.

The study consisted of several components. Firstly, the suitability of CRCs in the country’s context had be assessed in order to select variables through Focus Group Discussions and then to design survey instruments and methods. Trainings had then designed and organised for supervisors and trainers of enumerators in the survey regions.

Ten districts were selected, using the criteria of distance from the regional centre and the final population for the survey were selected randomly from each category in the chosen regions. A sample of 6,900 households was finally selected.

Key informant interviews, a literature survey and participant observation methods were also used as tools to substantiate the survey.

Structured questionnaires were administered to the respondents before the trained enumerators and continuous process audits were conducted, to enhance the validity and reliability of the data generated.

Finally, the results were categorized and entered into data-processing software in order to produce quantitative data analysis for this report.

The second section of the report, briefly presents the policy background. The third section presents the major findings and analysis of the CRC study, and policy implications for the introduction of best practices for public service delivery. The fourth part presents a summary of the study conclusions.

Report commented that though exploratory in nature, the exercise not only built awareness and capacity in the stakeholders, but also offered diagnostic pointers to the concerned public bodies to improve the quality of the services.

It added, “These initiatives are, however, recent changes in the style of administration, and it would take some time for the spirit of participation to get translated into day-to-day practices in government.”

Sri Lankan context

Let us hope that a fully functional CRC system will be introduced in Sri Lanka before long.

Such a system will bring an added opportunity to civil society in by opening up space to engage in policy processes. The process will help to empower citizens to discuss issues of services, in terms of availability, access, quality, affordability etc.

On the other hand, the information generated through CRCs will help the government to use the results as an input to the development plans.

The CRC studies will further strengthen the government’s partnership with donors and international bodies.

Participatory tools, such as CRCs, can highlight critical issues related to public service delivery. The ‘soft’ data resulting from the process is expected to complement the data provided by conventional tools, which tend to extract quantitative information. The CRC study should be very useful and important in contributing to the country’s development process, in gauging citizen’s perceptions of public services, and by empowering beneficiary communities to assist with social accountability.

Finally, CRC findings can help to test some of the policy conclusions reached in other analytical studies from the citizens’ point of view.