Citizen Community Boards: Local tools for Governance and community monitoring in Pakistan
Name of Organization:
Geographical Scope:
Regions:
Country:
Purpose:
In 2001, the government of Pakistan introduced their Local Government Plan, devolving many powers to district and sub-district levels. Set up as a means of monitoring the effects of the devolution on delivery of public services and local governance, the initial pilot baseline in ten districts covered more than ten thousand households in 2001.
Respondents gave their views and experience of health, education, water, judiciary and police services, and local government. Health and education services providers were also interviewed and the results were discussed in 238 gender-stratified focus groups in the participating communities. The full project extended the 2001 ten district pilot to cover all the districts of Pakistan.
In the first part of 2002 some 47,000 additional households in the remaining districts gave their views and experience of key public services and local government. Health and education services serving the sample sites were reviewed and union and district elected representatives and officials also gave their views. Field teams took back key findings to separate male and female focus groups in all the participating communities.
The report of the baseline national social audit (including the ten pilot districts) was launched in October 2003. The baseline national social audit reflects the situation at the start of devolution; it does not reflect the situation at the end of 2003 and it is not an evaluation of the two years since the start of devolution.
The social audit will be repeated annually over the next five years, to track progress under devolution and to inform policy. Capacity development will be an important issue, so as to ensure sustainability. Also under this project, more intensive work in a focus district began in early 2003, and will continue over the next three years.
In this district, Lasbela, located in Baluchistan province but not far from Karachi in Sindh, the CIET team is working with Citizen Community Boards (CCBs), other community groups, and with government at union (the lowest administrative unit), tehsil (county) and district level to build capacities for collecting, analyzing and using information to plan and implement priority improvements to key public services.
Area of Governance :
Local Governance and Decentralization
Website of initiative:
Publications:
Social Audit of governance and delivery of public services: Baseline survey 2002 National Report. www.ciet.org (go to library page under Pakistan).
Cost (specify currency):
Pilot: 100 000 USD. Full project: 1 000 000 CAD
Funding sources:
Pilot: UNDP and UNESCO. Full Project: Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
Source of Data:
Own source of data
Type of Data Collection:
Administrative Data
Focus groups
In depth interviews
Random sample population survey
Specifications of type of data collection:
CIET methods:
The cross design of social audit and evaluation techniques known as the CIET Method (footnote 1) -- also known as sentinel community surveillance (SCS) (footnote 2) or service delivery surveys (SDS) (footnote 3) -- tries to maintain epidemiological coherence while introducing the results of surveys for discussion between communities and planners.
The method relies on a panel of sentinel communities chosen and weighted to link the sample to the universe it represents. Cyclical contacts with these sentinel sites are effectively a concentration of measurement resources in time and place, an intense focus of quantitative and qualitative methods in a panel of mini universes. The ability to repeat measurement in the same place makes impact estimation relatively straightforward. These households can be contacted in successive cycles, perhaps a year or two years later, to measure differences over the period. These differences can be related to programmatic input and other factors that might be vary across different sites.
The impact assessment is based on the time sequence and the heterogeneity between sites. The CIET cross-design usually involves 120 contiguous households in each site to permit the analysis of local factors in the context of household-level occurrences. Some environmental factors might be quantified easily (for example, presence of school, cost of drugs) or they may be more qualitative (adequacy of sanitation, level of participation in community affairs). If these factors affect the whole cluster, comparisons can be made between clusters or groups of clusters.
footnote 1. Andersson N, Martinez E, Cerrato F, Morales E and Ledogar RJ., The Use of Community-Based Data in Health Planning in Mexico and Central America, Health Policy and Planning 1989;4(3):197-206.
footnote 2. Ledogar RJ and Andersson N., Impact Estimation Through Sentinel Community Surveillance: An affordable epidemiological approach, Third World Planning Review 1993;15/3:263-272.
footnote 3. Presidential Commission of Inquiry against Corruption: Survey of corruption in the police, judiciary, revenue and lands services. CIETinternational/EDI/CIDA: Dar es Salaam July 1996.
Measurement Methods / Tools Generated or Used :
See CIET Methods above
List of Indicators:
Health, education, water, judiciary and police services, and local government.
Main Users:
Civil society
Donor agencies
International agencies
Media
Policy makers
Researchers