Tag: public service

Good communication is good policy

In 2017, in his Jamhuri day (Kenya’s independence day) speech, President Kenyatta of Kenya announced his Big Four Agenda. To enhance the manufacturing sector, to build 500,000 affordable homes, to ensure all Kenyans are food secure and to build and deploy a universal health coverage (UHC) system to ensure all Kenyans have access to affordable health care. Since then technical committees have sat and designed the requisite policies, regulations and actions needed to make this a reality. However, in a recent conversation, I had with someone working on the UHC policy, I was struck when told that without better political support, and funding; UHC in Kenya would remain consigned to the realm of flowery speeches. A policy that could save millions of Kenyans misery and bankruptcy will die a slow death for lack of money and support.

Africa does not lack for good policy. Around the continent, there are reams of policy that could genuinely change people’s lives sitting on shelves in the offices of government departments, think-tanks, civil society groups and universities, all of them gathering dust. In the world of policy, good policy is often stopped by two things political reality and financial constraints. Ambitious policy rarely ever survives the gauntlet that those two constraints pose. In a previous post, I talked about reforms that would enable governments to better implement good and ambitious policy. In this post, I want to take a step back and examine how we can get good policy to the stage of implementation in the first place with proper funding commitment and political support built using effective and persistent communication

 

Embedding core policy support

Policy has to be sold. To the public, to those who will implement it, to experts, to civil society, to the media and even to digital influencers. This selling is done via communication with all those stakeholders. Crucially, this communication has to start before policy gets to the implementation phase. Public opinion has (as Samantha Power once put it) a circular problem. Circular, because public opinion is rarely roused on its own, it is usually provoked by public leadership (e.g. political or other community leaders making something an issue), and public leadership is usually itself provoked by public opinion (e.g. public outrage at a particular issue provoking a political response). Thus, when done properly, communicating policy is a journey. A journey that first builds a base of support for the ideas and goals behind the policy and how it is relevant and beneficial among key stakeholders. A presidential speech or two and some articles in the newspapers are not enough, you need to engage people who will form the core base of support in forums, spaces, and channels where they are comfortable and attentive.

Getting public support

Once you have that critical base of support you then need to sell your policies to the two most important groups of stakeholders; the public and people within government who have to implement it.

Effective broad public communication is not merely a matter of adverts or getting a popular musician or sportsman to tout a particular policy. It is a multi-channel and messenger affair. Rather than telling the public that some policy is good for them, you need to engage people, from the mass media right down to community forums and door to door campaigns. That way you build an understanding of the policy, its goals and benefits at an individual, community and mass level. By successfully selling a policy to the public, you can bypass the political viability problem. When people quote political viability as a problem, they are usually referring to the lack of political support for a particular policy. However, by building public support through smart and inclusive communications, you can create political viability through public pressure. And with political viability and support, you have the ability to get proper funding.

The people within the government are usually forgotten in policy advocacy campaigns, but it is crucial that you get the support of the people who will be implementing the policy. Do they understand it, do they understand the impact it will have on the lives of their fellow citizens, do they see what role they are playing in bringing those positive outcomes to life. If the people implementing the policy don’t buy into its chances of success diminish significantly. The people in government who are implementing the policy need to understand and back the policy because they, they are also the people who have to defend and sell those policies to the public and political policymakers and if they aren’t invested, then the investment of others likely won’t follow.

Communicating Policy Implementation and beyond

Getting support for a policy is not enough though. Communication does not stop at implementation. Rather communication is an essential element of implementation. Stakeholders and the wider public need to know and understand what is happening with a policy that they lent their support to, to get it off the ground. They need to understand what progress is being made, the successes, and achievements of the policy. Beyond keeping people up to date, this allows you to make mistakes, to withstand the inevitable missteps that happen in all complex programs. However, because you have been open and upfront with your stakeholders and the public about those mistakes and clearly communicated solutions for these problems, you will be in a much better position to recover from any issues with an understanding public willing to cut you some slack.

Communicating policy in Africa

African governments can be singularly terrible at communicating policy. Policy generally comes as a surprise, presented as a fait accompli something from on high that is good for development and thus good for you and you better not question it. Which ends up with people being suspicious about those policies, and the people who are charged with implementation see it as just another order they need to carry out (or look like they are carrying out as opposed to being invested in the policy and its success.

Policy does not sell itself, even if it is fantastic. It needs to be communicated to all the people that will be impacted by it. It’s an often-overlooked part of the policy process, especially in Africa. Around the continent, it’s not just Kenya attempting to implement some form of universal health coverage. South Africa is exploring plans, Lagos state is set to make it mandatory, Tanzania has a political commitment to do so. As Africa explores and tries to implement ambitious policies such as these, policymakers and governments need to understand that part of good policy is good communications. That through effective communication they can build broad effective support for their policies and in doing so create the political will that will give them the political and financial ability to actually implement them properly.

Public Service Reform – Making African Governments Work

A key element in development is effective government. Lots of countries around the continent have policies, plans and blueprints coming out of their ears, many of them fantastic. The problem is actually implementing these policies. Furthermore, governments are not just implementing agencies they also provide a range of public services to their citizens. However actually using these services often means navigating a minefield of corruption, bureaucracy and inefficiency that is both demoralising and dehumanising. Effective service delivery is just as important as effective development policy implementation and at the centre of both is the public service and its failings.

This is not a new problem, and over the last three decades, we have seen multiple efforts (usually donor-funded) around the continent aimed at reforming the public service, to be more efficient, effective, relevant and cost less. The problem with many of these efforts is that they are top-down, often designed externally that do not properly consider the people that they are trying to reform or the people in whose name the reforms are being pursued. To effectively reform the African bureaucracies, we have to rethink how we think about public service reform policy.

What is the point?

As with any policy, public service reform must have a goal at its core. Goals that are understandable to the wider public and local in their origin.

Most public service reform efforts are highly technical focusing on cost driven issues around wages, performance tracking and enhancement and efficiency. These things are important, but they are not visible. And when reforms are not visible, they cannot be seen and felt by the public at large, which means the reforms will run into political and institutional resistance. Most studies of public service reform efforts emphasise the need to depoliticise the public service and get political support for reforms. However, while political support is useful it is not a necessary condition for reform. If the reforms are visible, understood and can be felt by the public then political support can be formed from public support rather than the other way round.

With this in mind, it is crucial to ensure that the goals of public service reform are not purely back office, metrics-based ones but goals that have an impact on citizen-facing services. This ensures that you can bypass political resistance and that the reforms are rooted in local concerns.

Reforming bureaucracy is about people

Often, when public service reform is talked about in terms that dehumanise it. It’s about reforming systems, and structures, the target is a faceless bureaucracy, which no one likes. That’s all good and well until you remember that those bureaucrats are people, with concerns and aspirations of their own, families to support and careers they wish to protect. Too often public service reform is something that is done to people rather than with them. If you want your reforms to stick you need to get the buy-in of the people you are trying to reform. The public sector has decades of experience in appearing to comply with or blocking action. If you want compliance and reform, then it requires that reforms be done with the people in public agencies and departments. They must have a voice, feel that their concerns are taken seriously and have the goals of the reforms explained to them. In short, you cannot do public service reform without the buy-in of a key stakeholder, the public servants themselves.

The second area in which public service reform is about people is culture. All organisations and institutions develop a culture, which informs how people view and do their jobs, and the goals of their organisation. The public service has a culture, an ethos. For sustainable public service reform, you need to change that culture and ethos. The first key to that is making the public service something to be proud of. Explain and emphasising the role that public servants play, and its potential to make a positive impact. Working in the public service shouldn’t be something that causes others to roll their eyes or make jokes, it should be something people can be proud of. In doing so you can start to create a new culture of service and excellence, and that is precisely the culture we want in the public service.

Efficiency is fine, results are key, transparency is a must

As stated earlier, often civil service reform efforts focus on efficiency, which is important, but results are key, particularly results that people can feel and see. I know I have made this point previously, however reforming bureaucracy to be more efficient is useless when citizen facing institutions are services are terrible. Thus, efficiency is fine, but visible results are key.

On top of visible results. Public accountability and transparency are key to reform. If the government remains a black box, reforms will never take. In addition, it discourages bad behaviour by making those actors and agencies accountable to the public and their peers.

The best, the brightest… and the youngest

If public service reform has people at its core, the recruiting the right people is critical and recruitment can take advantage of Africa’s young people who are driven to solve problems and build a better future. Taking advantage of our best and brightest, of talented young professionals and university graduates. Recruiting and integrating them into the public, creating a new generation of motivated, professional and skilled public servants who can form the core of a reformed public service.

A great example of this is Liberia. After fourteen years of civil war by the time, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became president the country was a mess, and the public service was a nearly broken institution. Recognising this, President Johnson started the President’s Young Professionals Program a two-year program “that recruits and places recent Liberian university graduates in important government roles and provides them with training and mentorship as they support the government’s top priorities”. A 2016 report by Princeton University showed that program had been immensely successful, and that “About 90% of the program alumni continue to working government and or are studying abroad on government scholarships. A few fellows have risen to become departmental directors or assistant ministers.” The Liberian example shows that attracting young talent into the public service is not only possible but with the right mentorship and training, they can make a real difference. Around the continent, we produce over 10 million graduates a year, half cannot get a job. While the government cannot employ all of them, the government can hire the best and brightest without nepotism or political consideration but on merit. One feature of public service reform is hiring on the basis of merit, whether it was the introduction of exams in imperial China 2000 years ago or U.S. Civil Service reform in the 1880s. There is no reason we cannot follow suit and recruit the best and brightest of our youth not just to help drive reforms but incubate them for the long-term.

Africanising public service reform

If we want to implement our development programs, we need an effective public service. If we genuinely want public services to be accessible and effective, they do require reform. These reforms must not only cut costs and improve efficiency but improve accountability, transparency, with people, their culture and most importantly results that positively impact the public at its centre. In other words, we need to Africanise public service reform policy itself because after years of trying we have learned that copy-pasting solutions without contextualising them to Africa never works.

Other than a policy aimed at hiring young people, I have tried to stay away from advocating specific policies. This is because while the challenges facing public service reform may be similar in many African countries the local context also makes them wholly different. What’s needed is a policy approach from which solutions can follow. An approach that recognises that public servants are citizens and stakeholders in the process of reform, that the culture of public service needs positive change, that the public needs to see concrete results if they are to support reforms and that transparency is crucial if the reforms are to stick. Despite all the failed attempts at public service reform, I don’t think it’s hopeless, I think we just haven’t tried the right approach yet.