Dear Eddi Sakti: Excellent report. My answer to your concluding question is to involve the citizenry (and the business community) throughout the development of the e-government program. The primary objective of e-government should be the improvement of government services to the citizens, business and other communities, and not operational efficiency. As to transparency, it is the involvement of the people and not computerization that creates openness. You may be interested in the approach being taken in Macedonia (see separate email) which is no bigger than most ketjamatans (old spelling...) Sampai bertamu lagi on-line....
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. ..snip... > 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. > > This problem can be solved. Since it is impossible to train all the > people in how to use ICT to get information, I think the best way is to > train the local civil society organisations. It is an obvious solution! ..snip... > This shows that ICT for decentralization can only work if the local > people are involved and in control. They know the honest local > organisations. They know what information they need about their > government. I am very worried that this donor decentralization fad (as I > call it) will make things worse in the local areas because ICT can make > dishonest and powerful people even more powerful, even if they are at > the local government level. My question, that was not posed by the > Moderator, is: How can we get the international donor organisations to > support local communities to use ICT so they can make local government > better? ------------ 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
