The role of ICT within decentralisation and post-decentralisation process in Ethiopia

The Societal Problem and Main Goal

The aim of this project is to fill the gap between government and citizens and improve government service delivery during the decentralisation process and in Ethiopia. Mainly, the process of the decentralisation has an deep impact in the regions and countries with authoritative

regimes and mainly where the process of decentralisation has played significant role. In recent years the process of decentralisation has taken place in many developing countries in Latin America and Africa. In the period of 2002-2003, Ethiopia decentralized its service delivery through fiscal transfers from the federal to regional, and then down to municipal, administrations. The main goal is to improve service delivery through decentralisation and overcomes the most frequent challenges and obstacles during the decentralisation process.

The main objective is to set up reporting and controlling mechanism within the government delivery service based on citizen engagement, i.e. creation of functioning mechanism of reporting in order to ensure the transparent process of decentralisation. The initiative will be tactical since it be targeted to local region, i.e. Oromo region with specific using of one online platform MyAmbascha.org. The engagement will be thin to hybrid oriented since it will be on large scale, quick and executive. The crucial will be participation of citizens and thus based on crowdsourcing. The interaction of participants with decision-makers will be based on the online platform tool MyAmbasha.org.

Main initiator and key actors:The main initiator and the key actor is the non-governmental organisation called Ambasha which will be the leading element in the entire project, i.e. in charge of creation, managing online platform My Ambascha.org. The Oroma Regional Government will be representing government on national and local level. The local municipalities in cooperation with Oroma Regional Government will be also the next key actors. The Ethio Postal Service, as a main logistic and delivery provider about the entire project, will be in charge of delivery of list of codes for enabling

communication and reporting via MyAmbasha.org. The spearheading initiative is nongovernemtanl organisation called Ambasha since it has a significant role of mediator between a national and local government when distributing information and government delivery services.

The target audience are citizens in the effected regions and localities where the service delivery is carried on. The second group is public officials and civil servants who are in charge of ensuring government delivery services, distribution of services, maintaining local systems and project management. The selected bodies from the Health, Education department within the national government will be implemented into the project initiative and will get access to the online platform to provide information about the projects, government services which will be monitored via MyAmbasha.org platform. 

How does it work?The project “MyAmbesha.org” is a two-way online platform, which enables government, and citizens control the distribution of government delivery services in the selected regions in Ethiopia, but mainly in the Oromo regions. The platform is very similar to FixMyStreet.com, where everybody can view, discuss, report and suggest solutions for local problems as well as reported the problems during the government delivery process. However, the MyAmbesha.Org serves as an online tool for reporting and monitoring the quality of government services delivery. Therefore, the local schools, local clinical centres and hospitals, local maintaining road systems such as bridges, wells, irrigation systems, draining systems etc. Thus every citizen can report if something is broken in the roads, water irrigation system, whether the doctor or teacher or municipality civil servants shows up at work. The online system can provide current information and frequent regular updates about distribution of humanitarian aids during natural disasters. The monitoring process from the independent subject is very expensive if it is not supported by international aid. However, creating own mechanism consisting of  local people and residents in order to monitor government service delivery can set up long-term, sustainable process of controlling mechanism as well as build the trust between government and citizen. 

What are the risks and opportunities?

The main risks are that the main issues may not be delivered to correct person and office in charge of the reported issues. The citizens in the areas can lose motivation to report issues, impulses to the higher levels. Also the fact that every SMS will be charged can discourage the local citizens. Due to electricity blackout and low internet connection, the technical problems with online platform and reporting mechanism Ambasha.org. can be expected to The timeline will be realistic and it will take time to set up when citizens will get used to it to report the governments to fix it. The biggest challenge will be to draw attention to citizens in order to use and report problems via the online platform MyAmbasha.org. Also the frequent gaps between the communication and traditional Ethiopian society, elite capture, communication gaps may cased risks in order to make this project successful. The integrating new information and data into existing bureaucratic systems, tailored to the specific socioeconomic, political, and cultural realities of local governments can be also difficult to overcome and thus these obstacles cannot be neglected. The fact that this induced participation can be perceived that is comes from the government and thus promoted through policy actions of the state and implemented by bureaucracies. 

The evaluation metrics and indicators of successThe combination of qualitative and quantitative indicators will be used to evaluate process. Numbers of participating institutions, numbers of participants - citizens, numbers of reported issues and numbers of fixed issues. Those numbers will be equally measured from the position of independent reviewer. The qualitative and quantitatively measurement indicated above will proved the impact of campaigns and the use of ICT platform within the process of engagement of citizens. The measuring will be based from the numbers exported the database of MyAmbascha.org. and thus it can be hardly falsificated. The exported data from the MyAmbashaPlatform will easily provided the current, clear data about the engagement of citizens into the monitoring process. The data about the reports, codes and current situation will be also published on the website of the platform in the machine-readable format as an open data and thus everybody can use it and make analysis on it. This makes the project transparent and it provides accountability to the entire process of collecting and gathering data. Hence, the comparison of the figures and outcomes from the different time period and categories of the project. The platform will be based on open source and this helps to transfer and use this project into other regions and countries.