Institutional Reform and Organisational Change

Rwanda: Land Tenure Reform

HTSPE provided support to the Rwandan Ministry of Lands, Environment, Forestry, Water and Mines (MINITERE now the Ministry of Natural Resources - MINIRENA) to facilitate land reform through a process of institutional capacity building for decentralised land administration and the development of a Strategic Road Map for implementation. The scope of work involved:

• development of policy and legal framework;
• design and development of institutional framework;
• capacity building in all aspects of law, regulations and procedures;
• field trials of land tenure regularisation;
• economic impact, monitoring and evaluation assessments of field trials;
• design and implementation of new administration systems; and
• establishing government, donor and civil society consultation frameworks.

 See more details in the links below.

Nigeria: Federal Public Service Reform

This HTSPE-managed (DFID funded) contract supported civil service reform in Nigeria’s Federal Government. The short-term priority was to tackle payroll fraud; remove ghost workers and large numbers of redundant posts; facilitate a process of organisational restructuring; improve service delivery standards; and start a process of pay reform that will provide incentives for good quality staff to come into the service and stay there.

HTSPE’s support to the reform process involved:

• support to the Federal Government of Nigeria to develop a clear road map for sustainable improvements to the performance of the public sector;
• ensure that service delivery pilot projects effectively demonstrate the benefits of restructuring and reform for service delivery; and
• strengthen central Civil Service Agencies to enable them to make a positive contribution to the reform process.

Vietnam: Capacity Building for Central Region Poverty Reduction

HTSPE managed this project to facilitate the creation of conditions for improved decentralised poverty reduction initiatives in Vietnam.

The objectives of the project were to:

• improve local service delivery performance in selected pilot areas, and
• develop a set of key policy and practice changes aimed at enhancing poverty-focused service delivery modalities.

Activities included:

• addressing staffing, planning and budget-setting processes to better meet the needs of households at the village level in target communes;
• improved access to production-oriented services by poor households in the target communes, and improved land use planning models;
• developing curricula for capacity building and a core cadre of trained staff;
• introducing an active policy and practice network in target provinces, with participation of Government, assistance agencies, non-governmental organisations and local citizens; and
• development of clear policy and practice recommendations related to all forms of decentralised programme service delivery in upland areas that can be used as a basis for ADB’s and DFID’s policy dialogue with the Government.

Russia: Public Sector Institutional Reform

The project contributed to the administrative reform programme of the Russian Government by providing technical assistance to improve the performance of state organisations. There were four components:

• Drafting administrative regulations for selected state ministries, agencies and services on standards of service, performance indicators and accessibility to citizens.
• Defining state services and service standards for their delivery, quality assessment and for benchmarking.
• Developing a system of flexible indicators to measure government performance.
• Developing recommendations and pilots for electronic-government and Government to Citizen (G2C) management and information systems.

The project formed part of the Russian Government’s federal target programme for administrative reform, 2005-2010. The aim of the programme is that government becomes more accountable and evaluates its activities in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and public satisfaction. Thus there was a re-emphasis to balance input criteria, such as process consistency, rule-adherence and hierarchical control, with outcome criteria, measured by indicators of administrative performance and the benchmarking of public services.

Study visits were undertaken to the UK and Sweden to examine the systems for performance indicators used in government.

Nepal: Agriculture Perspective Plan Support Programme

The Nepal Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives’ (MOAC) Agriculture Perspective Plan Support Programme (APPSP) was designed to deliver appropriate agricultural support services to the rural poor through improved policy and institutional arrangements. This project provided technical advisory support and fund management implementation for the ongoing APPSP.

The programme was focused on two levels of government:

1. At the district level, where a fund for agricultural service delivery (District Agriculture Development Fund - DADF) was established in twenty districts. The DADF was managed by the District Development Committees, and the programme built the capacity of these committees to plan for and manage the DADF, ensuring that the poor and excluded beneficiary groups were targeted by the fund.
2. At the central level, where the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MOAC) and other Agriculture Perspective Plan implementers were assisted with organisational and policy support.

In order ensure opportunities and lessons learned from the programme are incorporated into future government initiatives, good practice and other key lessons that emerged from the APPSP were captured and disseminated within the MOAC and more broadly to the 75 districts of Nepal.