Lahore, October 31, 2018 (PPI-OT): The Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB)’s number of smartphone applications have improved the public sector performance in Pakistan and replicated by eight countries, which include Nigeria, Albania, Romania, Mozambique, Afghanistan Ethiopia, Congo and Rwanda. Dr. Umar Saif Chairman PITB and founding Vice Chancellor of Information Technology University (ITU) the Punjab while addressing World Bank Report Conference, says a message received from Washington DC here today.
He said that the inclusion of two projects developed by PITB among 15 projects around the globe for case studies in the World Bank Report titled, ‘Improving Public Sector Performance through Innovation and Inter-Agency Coordination’ was a matter of pride and honor for Pakistan. PITB’s developed projects were also replicated in the provinces of Pakistan, he added. On the issuance of the said global report during a conference, the World Bank included PITB’s projects i.e.
Citizen Feedback Monitoring Program, which was used by 20.5 million citizens since 2011 to date for giving feedback, suggestions, complaints against 70,000 officials, which were rectified and action was taken according to the law. The World Bank said inexpensive smartphones have been used in the Punjab to monitor the performance of officials in several sectors. The Punjab government has scaled up a small pilot in one of its districts to create a wide-ranging monitoring program that leverages the ubiquity of cellphones to proactively solicit feedback from users of public services.
“The Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), the provincial government’s technology agency, turns that information into easily digestible quantitative and qualitative data, and provides that information to senior officials who can hold frontline civil servants accountable for their performance,” the bank said. “The smartphone revolution in Punjab showed how a government could easily improve data collection and service delivery by using cheap and easy-to-use smartphone applications.” The second project included in the program is e-Vaccs smartphone application, which has improved the vaccination coverage area from 25 % to 88 % and helped in the eradication of Polio.
The bank reported the improved performance of public employees resulted in better outcomes for citizens, particularly in the highly successful vaccine program intervention. When the vaccine application was first launched in October 2014, vaccinators reached just 25 percent of the polygons the PITB used to measure geographic coverage across the province. In May 2016, that figure had increased to 88 percent, as a result of the increased attendance and coverage, the percentage of fully immunized children under 20 months rose from 62 percent in 2014 to 81 percent in 2016, and 95 percent of children were fully vaccinated against polio.
“The increased vaccination coverage helped reduce the risk of contracting polio. After having 7 polio cases in 2013 and 5 in 2014, Punjab had only 2 cases in 2015 and 0 in 2016,” the bank said. The World Bank said creating incentives to improve civil servants’ efficiency was a key goal of many of the PITB’s reforms. “By increasing monitoring of vaccinators, for example, first by monitoring attendance and then by scrutinizing geographic coverage, the Punjab government was able to quickly improve the percentage of children receiving vaccinations across the province.”
“Application of smartphones supported a broader operational change in Pakistan,” the report remarked. The World Bank while mentioning reforms in the Punjab, added that the province introduced a citizen feedback program to monitor the performance of civil servants, to eliminate petty corruption, and improve public services. “Starting from a small pilot in one of its districts, the province now operates a wide-ranging monitoring program,” the bank reported.
“The national passport office has since taken the approach on board and attributes citizen feedback to helping them slash the processing time for passports from three weeks to ten days.” All the customers of the Pakistan Passport office – averaging around 15,000 per day across more than 100 offices – receive a text message from the Director General checking if they faced any bribery or other problems.
The World Bank said a district in Sindh has also implemented biometric monitoring systems to help reduce employee absenteeism in its 45,000 schools. “In other parts of Pakistan, reforms have been taken to strengthen merit-based recruitment of teachers by tightening procedures for entrance examinations.” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s government is also taking a legislation initiative to create new norms for millions of day-to-day state-citizen interactions, inducing higher citizen expectations, and creating new standards of behaviour for government servants.
For more information, contact:
Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB)
11th Floor, Arfa Software Technology Park,
346-B, Ferozepur Road, Lahore, Pakistan
Tel: +92-42-35880062
Fax: +92-42-99232123
Email: info@pitb.gov.pk
Website: www.pitb.gov.pk