- by Abid Ullah Jan
A unique model of information system for local development, presently being implemented by UNICEF in Pakistan.
Introduction to the handbook
IRSP and UNICEF conceptualised and implemented a unique Community Information System (CIS) in 20 Union Councils of District Mardan. It has been an evolutionary process as no blue print was present before launching the programme. Concepts were discussed and activities were planned and implemented in different phases. Changes were made according to the ground realities. The idea behind developing this manual is to share the crux of our experiences over a period of two years with all those who may like to undertake similar programmes in their respective areas.
After considerable deliberation over the first draft of concept paper and pre-testing in a couple of villages, the programme was cautiously launched in five Union Councils to develop an initial model on a small scale. Few indicators were selected from health, education, nutrition and sanitation sectors to keep size of the resultant data manageable. Resources for launching the programme were also limited. The staff was also exposed for the first time to the idea of developing an information management model for local planning. Their capacity building also became a gradual process.
Based on the successful experiment in five Union Councils, the programme was scaled up to 20 Union Councils in 2002. Keeping interest of other development partners and need to the new Local Government set up in mind, this hand book shares our experiences, so that other may take some lessons from it and implement the same programme with their own input according to their needs for much better results.
This handbook is equally useful for the field staff and the management of implementing organisation trying to adapt this programme according to peculiar situation in its programme area. The concept of CIS is that community activists collect and manage basic information for local development on a sustainable basis and aware community makes informed decisions in identifying action at local level. Simultaneously, the same information is passed upwards to UC and district levels for planning on available data.
CIS and Local Government
After several years local Government tier has been revived and made functional in Pakistan. There is now a great scope for development to be devolved and decentralised in real sense. With the introduction of Union Council as the basic planning unit, the stage is set for the community to actively participate and exercise responsibility that comes along with it for developing their villages and Union Councils. For this purpose the Local Government set up needs support mechanisms, such as the Community Information System (CIS) for local level planning.
It was in preparation for this ‘decentralised’ scenario that IRSP and UNICEF have been developing CIS to institutionalise participatory development process at different levels in the districts. The Programme focuses on making the local planning process efficient and capable of handling the devolved autonomy.
Although all EDOs and line agencies in the districts know that development programmes should be based on people’s needs, and that they must be approved by the District Assembly, most line agencies have their own processes for identifying and selecting development projects and programmes. These institutions interpret the notion of decentralisation as being applicable to local bodies only. People’s participation is also interpreted similarly. Consequently, policies and practices that were developed with good intentions for local development do not function as targeted so far.
Planning process at the local level is extremely necessary to avoid function of the elected local bodies reducing to "rubber stamping" the plans of line agencies. Planning must follow the planning cycle not implementation, as has been the case so far. A local information system helps in integrated planning which covers the missing functional linkages among various sectoral issues which arise due to isolated planning.
To ensure the sustainability and effectiveness of development programmes, CIS stresses on close monitoring and evaluation of on-going projects and available facilities as well.
A successful CIS could lead to converging national level development policies -- of the donor agencies and the government -- and village-level problems and the potential of development at the districts level. It helps create an environment in which resources available at the Union Council level for local development are supplemented by those available at the district and provincial levels.
In order to make the Union Council and districts’ development efforts more effective, the Programme lays stress on all villages and Union Councils developing their respective periodic plans and long-term strategies and goals. The UCs in particular need to have long-term vision and goals to guide their development activities. The same is true for the District. It is only when the local authorities have a clear vision of where they want their district to go, how and when, that they can take a more integrated approach to development.
As far institutionalisation of the process is concerned, the plans that trickle up from the villages and UC need to find funding from various sources. Linkages are different levels is very for this purpose. These kinds of linkages are more apparent in the plans emanating from socially mobilised communities. Twenty five percent fund allocation to CCBs would help many VDPs find for materialising their plans. Those that cannot be funded through the CCBs allocated funds would percolated up to the next source of resources at UC and District levels.
CIS and poverty alleviation
The basic approach and commonly used practice in poverty alleviation programmes is that social organisers do the necessary mobilisation work at the community level and organise the community in the form of men and women community organisations. Afterwards, community is made to assess its present situation. The Social Organisers conduct short surveys to develop portfolio of opportunities. In consultation with the community, households are ranked as poor, well off and poorest of the poor for focused interventions.
For development plans and community infrastructure schemes, the SOs conduct sessions with the community, whereby the community comes up with identification of different needs. The SOs play a vital role in facilitating them towards identification of their actual need and the project required to address problem of the majority of the community members.
CIS addresses this process in a scientific manner because information is received from each household and each facility in the community. Community develops prioritised plans according to the identified needs. There is no chance that one of two influential persons would hijack the identification or planning process. There is no way that the community would make an uninformed decision. It makes the SOs job very easy. Instead of trying to reduce the “shopping list” of randomly identified problems, or trying to take majority out of the influence of a few, the SOs have complete data to guide the community and make informed decisions.
Apart from facilitating SOs in targeted and integrated interventions, CIS helps management of the poverty alleviation programmes to select poorest of the poor villages and Union Councils, because the socio-economic status part of the household questionnaire and the secondary data gives accurate information. It is very easy to classify villages and UCs on the basis of relative poverty. A sample village ranking of villages and UC by poverty is given at Annex-12.
Furthermore, CIS provides existing status of a particular area for benchmark setting. Initial information can be used as baseline against which progress can easily be monitored after working in that area for some time.
The CIS information model defines the responsibility exercised by community members, Union Councils, line departments, EDOs, development organisations, etc. for managing relevant information in order to develop respective development plans and provide definite user groups with reliable and concise new bodies of knowledge.
In short, the CIS is an integrated system for knowledge management with a collaborative approach to information management. Its power is in its community-based, action oriented, adaptive approach to developing information and planning systems to support sustainable development and poverty alleviation efforts. CIS is a learning based approach that can be used to help communities access, develop, manage and refine information within a larger context of shared understanding.
The consolidated information at the DCIC in the DCO office becomes public knowledge – specifically selected, analysed, evaluated and restructured for the purpose of serving some of the planning decisions at different levels by different stakeholders, who otherwise may not be able to effectively and efficiently access and use this knowledge. The focus of the CIS framework is to create effective learning and planning environments, which brings together fragmented sectoral and community information into a single, accessible focal point in the form of DCIC. Facilitated community dialogue and planning processes can be used to structure the available knowledge and information to provide decision support. The participatory nature of this approach emphasises processes, which reduce the level of conflict surrounding many issues. This approach is similar to the cooperative information seeking of the joint fact finding process of interest based dialogue.
DCIC has an effective role at the district level. CIS acknowledges that the problem is often not that there is not enough information to address an issue (except the community based information that the CIS ensures to bring in), bu t rather that the information and knowledge is fragmented and difficult to access for all stakeholders.
The community dialogue and planning, which underpins the process should ensure that useful knowledge is provided and that a common understanding of the context in which individual bits of information becomes relevant is developed. The community information model developed by IRSP and UNICEF will need to address the range of issues faced by the community through the consultation process; for example what is the problem all about? How urgent is it? What and who is at the risk? Who is responsible? Who can address it? Who is liable? What are all the options?
> Go to Introduction to CIS
