PITB citizen feedback monitoring plan among winning case studies

LAHORE : The Citizen Feedback Monitoring Pogramme (CFMP), a flagship programme of Punjab government, run by Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) has been selected as one of the five winning case studies in the Global Delivery Initiative (GDI) competition organised by the World Bank.

Officials in PITB said the case study would soon be published in the Global Delivery Library on GDI’s platform. They said Global Delivery Initiative (GDI) was a collaborative effort of 40 development organisations to create a database of delivery challenges worldwide and innovative solutions to overcome them.

GDI along with World Bank launched its first Case Study Competition in January 2019. The core goals of GDI case studies are to identify the challenges and bottlenecks that arise during project implementation; analyse their root causes, trace how practitioners dealt with the problems, and actions performed to address the delivery challenges.

Officials said GDI had received 47 case studies from 29 organisations, addressing a range of development challenges in the countries around the world. The submissions were evaluated by a panel of experts from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Korea Development Institute School of Public Policy and Management, and the World Bank.

The panel evaluated each submission and determined the five winning case studies.

CFMP is already a globally recognised programme, acknowledged by international publications such as Princeton Review and Foreign Policy Magazine. CFMP was also selected by the World Bank as one of the 15 initiatives globally that are helping improve governance through innovative use of technology (World Bank Global Report 2018), officials added.

CFMP is designed to collect feedback from identified citizens who utilise public services. In turn, the feedback is used to identify problem areas and monthly performance reports are shared with government officials to take evidence based corrective measures for improving public service delivery, they maintained.

In order to contact citizens proactively, cell numbers are collected from the service delivery points such as public hospitals, property registration branches, driving licences and Rescue 1122, etc., and Interactive Robo-calls/SMS are sent to collect feedback from the citizens that automatically gets integrated into an online portal accessible to officials across Punjab.

CFMP presently monitors 25 different public services across Punjab. More than 28 million citizens have been contacted till date to solicit their feedback, they concluded.