Holding government accountable: What can the youth do?

Illustration: TBS

There is much talk now about the youth's role in government. But what exactly can that role be? How can we move from talking in generalities to doing something concrete? In this note, I propose a specific role for the young men and women of our country. This is just one suggestion. I am sure others will come up with additional ideas. 

My specific idea is the following: the youth may make an organised effort to collect feedback from the public on the quality of the government's projects and service delivery. They may then share the results of the feedback survey with the government agency responsible for the project or service delivery and their overseeing ministries. 

If the feedback indicates unsatisfactory project implementation or poor service delivery, the youth should then demand appropriate follow-on actions from the relevant agencies and ministries. 

This may help address a major problem in our government machinery—the lack of a strong performance culture. As we know, the government does many projects and provides many services. But do these projects meet their objectives? Are the expected beneficiaries of a service satisfied with the service delivery? These questions are often not asked by the government agency responsible for the project or the service delivery. This is due to the poor performance culture in government. 

Much of the government's attention is usually on spending the money allocated for the project or service delivery rather than on the results achieved. In other words, the focus is usually on inputs, less on outputs, and even less on outcomes. Let me clarify with one concrete example. 

Let us say that there is a government project through which some funding is provided to schools attended by students from low-income families. The objective is to improve the quality of education received by these students. The funds are to be used to provide some educational material for the students as well as nutritious meals. It is expected that this will improve educational outcomes for the students. 

The surveys may be designed to find out if the students have received the planned educational materials and nutritious meals, and if so, whether they are satisfied with their quality. The survey may also have questions on whether parents see any improvement in the quality of their children's education after they receive these materials and meals. 

In this example, the funds provided are the inputs, the educational materials and nutritious meals are the outputs and the improvement in the quality of education is the outcome. 

The distinction between inputs, outputs, and outcomes is important. Failure to comprehend this could be the cause of much confusion in the design and evaluation of a project. Real-world experience tells us that such confusions are common.

In real-life projects, the inputs may not necessarily lead to the outputs, the outputs to the outcome, and so on. This may happen, for example, if funds allocated for schools are spent inefficiently, e.g., syphoned off by corrupt teachers or government officials. When the inputs do not lead to the desired outputs, you have a deficiency in project implementation. 

But even when the money is well spent, we may not see the desired outcome. This is due to deficiencies in project design. For instance, in the above case, lack of nutritious meals may not be the cause of poor educational outcomes. Thus, here, even if parents report a regular supply of meals, they may not report any improvement in the educational outcomes of their children. Thus, the surveys will tell us two things. Is the desired project objective (in this case, improved education outcomes) being met, and if not, what might be the reason? 

So how will this youth-led initiative work? Let me be concrete. We may select a government service that is important for the public. We may then come up with a list of questions that may be asked in the survey. 

Ideally, the list should be short—not more than 10 questions. It is important that the questions are framed in a way that they capture the essential elements of service quality as expected by the public. The youth may consult with relevant experts to identify the right questions. 

The next stage is to conduct the surveys. Let us say the initiative starts in Dhaka city. We can select 10 localities in Dhaka where the survey will be conducted. The localities should be selected in a way that these are representative of the diversity of localities in Dhaka city. You don't want all your survey localities in Gulshan, for example, or all in old Dhaka. A team of ten young men and women will be assigned to each locality. So that's a youth survey contingent of 100 people. 

Each survey enumerator may conduct 4 surveys a day. Since the list of questions will be short, they may be able to cover more respondents per day. But I am being conservative and assuming each does 4 surveys each day. That amounts to 200 survey responses per five-day week (10 x 4 x 5) or 2,000 for the 10 localities in Dhaka. That is a fairly large sample size. 

Once the survey results are tabulated, the young people may prepare powerful presentations (which they are expected to be good at) and present the findings to the agencies and ministries, preferably with the relevant advisor present. Where the survey results show deficiencies in the quality of project implementation or service delivery, remedial actions should be promptly identified and implemented. 

The young men and women should then go back after an appropriate interval, let us say within 3 to 6 months, and carry out a second survey to assess if the remedial actions have borne fruit. Such surveys may be repeated till the desired improvement is achieved. 

Once such a pilot is carried out, hopefully with good results, the program may be expanded to cover the same service delivery in other cities or other service deliveries in Dhaka city. As we saw above, each survey may not take more than a week if we can mobilise 100 youth to do these. Thus, within a year, we may be able to cover several important service areas all over Bangladesh. 

This may appear to be a simple exercise. But it is potentially very powerful. Government agencies sometimes sit up and take notice when concrete evidence is provided instead of some general statements about project or service delivery quality. 

It is said that "What gets measured, gets done." And, if the youth can make that happen, all power to them!

Sketch: TBS

Syed Akhtar Mahmood is an economist who previously worked for an international development organisation.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.