Dear GKD Members: I write with reference to Eddi Sakti's point about transparency. I am most familiar with the conditions in Sri Lanka. The country has a long history of modern municipal government extending to the second half of the 19th century. But the long history notwithstanding, it has not made that much progress in the last 125 years. The revenue base is very limited, and taxation powers are highly circumscribed. Most Local Government (LG) institutions rely on central government and provincial government grants for a substantial amount of their annual budgets. Many LGs find it hard to provide the basic services to the community. In such circumstances, ICT to promote transparency and strengthen accountability is viewed more as a luxury. This is compounded by the fact that the national media is concentrated in Colombo and focuses mainly on the central government. Even the more prominent civil society organizations that scrutinize government are mostly in Colombo.
The challenge here is to use ICT cost-effectively to achieve the goal of transparency and accountability in LG. In Sri Lanka in the city of Kandy (population around 250,000 including the outer suburbs) I have been associated with a monthly town newspaper "The Kandy News" established over ten years ago that serves this purpose to some extent. It largely deals with town issues and the citizens have over the years come to regard it as a reliable source of information on municipal government. We publish both a hard copy and from more recently, a web edition as well. E-mail and the web edition have helped us to reach out to a lot of people who are interested in town issues. More recently we started a public seminar series on topics of local interest to encourage wider public discourse. My experience tells me that in developing countries we have to find a balance between ICT and other more conventional methods to promote good governance in LG and blend the two methods in the way that best suits local conditions. Sam Samarasinghe Editor The Kandy News On Friday, May 6, 2005, Eddi Sakti wrote: > The problem with ICT for local government is that there is never enough > money or people to do the job right. I have experienced this very > problem in my own country, Indonesia. I will give you an example and I > am sure the story is the same in other developing countries. > > We started decentralization of the government responsibilities many > years ago. Ministry of Health tried to decentralize a lot of > responsibilities as was demanded by the law. The World Bank funded > putting computers into kecamatan (Moderator's Note: 'district') to help > improve their operations. The trouble was that the funding was too > limited and most of the kecamatan did not get enough funds for them to > use ICT to do their new responsibilities. Some of the funding required > matching from the local government and many were not able to meet this > requirement. This was not the fault of the Ministry of Health or the > Government of Indonesia. As for my opinion, it was the fault of the > World Bank's limited funding. These things cannot be done halfway or > quickly. You need a lot of training and helping people change the way > they gather, analyze and use the information in addition to the > computers and the Internet. > > The funding is one problem, but there is an even bigger problem. Donors > are saying that decentralization will help "transparency" which means > that the local people will be able to see what their local government is > doing and will be able to have more control over it. But at the local > level the people do not know how to get the information that will keep > their local government honest. ..snip... ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For past messages, see: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
