In this paper, we have identified six components for the design and operationalization of institutional data strategies: This work aims to distill lessons learned from Development Gateway’s research and collaboration, designing data strategies with development and humanitarian agencies. In the current ‘data revolution’ era, data and digital are both a strategic asset and a source of institutional risk.

Strategies should be designed using:

•  a holistic approach,
• intentional leadership positioning, and
• a focus on the “right” investments.

Strategies should be operationalized through:

• responsible data practice,
• shared data use practices, and
• an appropriate governance plan.

We are continuously learning from our partners across various agencies, and hope this will be a useful starting point that may be adapted by organizational leaders to drive effective digital and data strategies in their institutional contexts.

Feedback about the approach outlined in this paper is welcome! Continue the conversation on social media using #DataStrategyPlaybook or by tagging @dgateway.

Development Gateway: An IREX Venture’s (DG’s) “At a Glance” series explores the highlights in DG’s white papers and other publications. In this installment of the series, we explore the white paper titled “Tracking Climate Finance in Africa: Political and Technical Insights on Building Sustainable Digital  Public Goods,” which was written by Dr. Catherine Weaver from the University of Texas at Austin and Tom Orrell, previously of DataReady and now a Deputy Director of Programs at DG. Weaver and Orrell explore the importance of climate finance tracking (CFT), common barriers to establishing climate finance tracking systems, and five insights on developing climate finance tracking systems.  

What is Climate Finance and a Climate Finance Tracking system? 

In order to combat the effects of climate change, financing is needed to fund effective climate fighting strategies, including funding to develop tools, programming, etc. that aim to equip governments and communities to predict, prevent, and address the needs provoked by climate change. Overall, climate finance is funding aimed at not only bringing the world closer to compliance with such climate policy as the 2015 Paris Agreement but is also aimed at protecting individuals and communities who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A climate finance tracking system is the planned process(es) and infrastructure supporting the tracking and monitoring of climate financing so that its impact can be tracked, analyzed, and (when appropriate) advanced or duplicated. 

The first barrier to climate finance and creating a climate finance tracking system is that the definition of climate finance is often subject to debate because of politically motivated contestation and ambiguity over what activities are directly or indirectly motivated by climate change concerns. Therefore, the first step in establishing a climate finance tracking system is arriving at a consensus amongst stakeholders (including countries, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society) on what counts as climate change activity.   

Once a common definition of climate change activity—and therefore, what constitutes climate finance—is established, a climate finance tracking system is needed in order to ensure climate finance is appropriately utilized and to track impact. While the specifics of what a climate finance tracking system looks like depends on the context in which it’s established, such a system can include tools like DG’s Aid Management Platform, an open-source tool that facilitates the monitoring of development activities in order to enhance aid effectiveness by allowing stakeholders to track activities from planning to implementation, and GIZ’s TruBudget, a collaborative and secured platform to track and coordinate the implementation of donor-funded investment projects. (Learn more about these tools and climate finance here.)

However, in order for any tools in a climate finance tracking system to be effective, the context in which the system is being established will ideally have many components, including digital infrastructure, human and computational capacity, data and accounting literacy, and complementary institutions and policies to ensure climate data is usable and useful for decision-making. Therefore, significant resources are needed in order for a climate finance tracking system to be effectively implemented. Here is an overview of five insights DG has identified on how best to create a climate finance tracking system.   

Dive deeper into these insights and learn more about climate finance tracking and climate finance tracking systems in the white paper.

The IMF predicts the global economy will shrink by 4.9% this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to a Gartner market analysis, the global IT market will shrink by 8% in the next year as a result of the recession.

However, the government technology market is expected to be more resilient, shrinking by only 0.6%. In fact, two government technology sectors – IT services and software – are predicted to grow in 2020 despite the severe global economic downturn.

How is government digital transformation growing, rather than shrinking?

As governments look to “build back better,” we can expect an influx of government spending to stimulate the economy, and a shift in priority goods and services to purchase. As the world transitions from emergency response to recovery, governments’ focus will shift from using technology to procure other products (as we described in our first blog in this series), to procuring technology products themselves. For example, Covid-19 has underscored the need for digital governance: not only digitizing government processes and workforces, but also the services provided to citizens — including education, health, registration authorities, housing and citizenship applications, etc.

Covid-19 has accelerated government digitization efforts across the globe as Ministries of Education shift to online learning, Ministries of Health roll out telemedicine services, and government employees continue to telework and access secure government servers via the cloud. Digital transformation is no longer a choice, but a core need. Working on extremely short timelines, to meet an entirely new set of needs, governments have relied heavily on existing and new digital solutions to meet increasing demands. However, longer-term investments in government digital service delivery require more rigorous procurement and design considerations.

Digitalization to support and rehabilitate local economies

Increased government spending on digital and IT services will not only streamline public service delivery, but also stimulate the economy. Redirecting government spending to domestic IT suppliers and local SMEs provides the added benefit of supporting local economies as they begin to rebuild from the initial shock of Covid-19. This presents a ripe opportunity to create jobs and stimulate the economy – but understanding who well-qualified domestic IT suppliers are, and the barriers they face to engaging with public procurement processes, is critical for making sustainable and effective investments. For example, the Indonesian Ministry of Health and National Standardisation Agency are relaxing noise restrictions on ventilators so that domestic manufacturers can speed up production. Adaptive and flexible procurement policy reforms such as these can help ensure efficient government spending during, and after, an emergency. Created in partnership with the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, DG’s indicator framework is a tool that can help governments understand and take smaller steps from their current “as-is” state to get to their desired “to-be” state of digital procurement reform.

The path – and the tools – to rebuilding responsibly

Moving forward, global government buyers that seek to procure digital solutions must take lessons from Covid-19 into account regarding user needs and holistic approaches.

Fortunately, the body of resources for governments looking to build resilient digital solutions is growing. For example, buyers can refer to OECD research and digital strategies to consider how policy compliments digitization; draw on knowledge from Australia and the United Kingdom which have both put together criteria/codebooks on digital service delivery; and prioritize user-centered design principles to ensure that digital solutions are used, useful, and build resilience.

The Emergency Procurement Report: Lessons Learned from Covid-19 report and indicator framework are key resources for country governments looking to responsibly adapt procurement operations to address Covid-19. We encourage wide use of the tool to identify where to strengthen procurement responses during emergencies, sustain government services, and support the economy during and post-crisis.

With citizens’ lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing KEMSA’s procurement in response to COVID-19. Open procurement data can help in improving the efficiency of emergency procurement and support civil society groups to detect corruption and monitor the effectiveness of service delivery.

“This level of transparency and through the use of technology will go a very long way in ensuring that we have the confidence of our people that those placed in institutions are able to manage the resources of the Kenyan taxpayer plus our development partners in an open and transparent manner” – President Uhuru Kenyatta

Much can be learned from Makueni County in Kenya, a county that publishes and uses open, accessible, and timely information on government contracting to engage citizens and businesses. The Makueni Open Contracting Portal is an interactive site built by Development Gateway (DG) that provides detailed information on each step of the tender, award, and contract implementation process at the county level. These steps are now recorded within the interactive Makueni Open Contracting Portal – making information available for citizens at each step of the process. The county plans to go a step further to publish all implementation data such as community monitoring reports, also known as PMC reports and supplier payment vouchers.

The goal of the portal is to improve the efficiency of public procurement management and support the delivery of higher-quality goods, works, and services for residents of Makueni County through enhanced citizen feedback.

What We Learned from Makueni County

Lesson 1: Public Data Improves Efficiency

The primary role of the Ministry of Health and KEMSA in Kenya during an emergency situation is to provide citizens timely, affordable, and efficient supplies and services. Digitizing and publishing procurement data will provide the Ministry insights on whether funding and services are reaching intended beneficiaries. 

Publishing procurement data will also encourage better monitoring from relevant state and non-state actors. The Ministry of Health and KEMSA will have the opportunity to aggregate non-state actors’ feedback and state actor insights. This feedback will enable them to make data-driven decisions that will improve service delivery to citizens, promote efficient allocation of resources and ultimately saving costs.

DG has developed interactive M&E dashboards to support analysis currently used by Makueni County. The series of charts and visualizations provide helpful data insights – such as top suppliers that received contracts and the percentage of awards that go toward the Access to Government Procurement Opportunities (AGPO), which requires tenders to be awarded to women, youth, and people with disabilities.

Since the start of the use of the Makueni open contracting portal in 2019, improved resource utilization and efficiency in procurement has been identified by the County leadership. Governor Kivutha Kibwana cited that the County has saved Kes. 30,000,000 from the Roads department as a result of using the portal.

Lesson 2: Building Trust is Essential to Combating Corruption

The complexity of emergency responses such as COVID-19 requires cooperation between the private sector, national, and county government to ensure timely delivery of supplies. KEMSA publishing data will promote feedback and engagement of business and citizens further building trust and collaboration. Publishing procurement data also equips civil society and citizens with the information needed to help combat corruption. For example, reporting counterfeits, frauds, and scams – which has been a key corruption issue identified globally in COVID-19 response procurement, particularly PPEs.

DG has implemented its corruption risk dashboard in Makueni, which uses high powered analytics and global research to identify risk profiles for potential corruption in procurement. KEMSA can adopt the corruption risk dashboard as a red-flagging tool to assist in identifying procurement activities that merit in-depth auditing of corruption risk – including fraud, collusion, and process rigging – over time. These analytics will allow the organization to address cases of corruption before taxpayer money is lost.

Lastly, publishing Beneficial ownership data can enable governments to quickly perform minimal standards of due diligence on companies they are buying goods and services from. As well as reducing the immediate risk of corruption, beneficial ownership data provides a valuable trail for future audit.

Since Development Gateway: An IREX Venture’s (DG’s) founding, we have prioritized working closely with multiple stakeholders—including everyone from local technical experts to government ministries and global partners—when developing digital solutions and gathering data. Through our Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI) program and its sister program Data on Youth and Tobacco in Africa (DaYTA), we have learned that creating governance structures, such as advisory boards or steering committees, is one approach to ensuring that digital solutions appropriately meet stakeholders’ needs and foster future engagement from them. In this blog, we explore three insights on how governance structures can advance buy-in with individual stakeholders while connecting them to one another.  

Why Governance Structures?

Governance structures—which are best practice to have when conducting primary research—have been essential to DG’s tobacco control work, because many of our stakeholders have indicated their desire to be included throughout program implementation and not just at the end. Several have echoed the common refrain: “You can’t do something for us without us.” We’ve also found that governance structures help coordinate collaboration across our stakeholders, especially since we have a group of stakeholders with very different backgrounds, expertise, and areas of interest in our tobacco control work. These stakeholders also all have different perspectives and varied ways in which they engage with our work. Therefore, DG has formed various governance structures in both our TCDI program and DaYTA program. 

The Role of Governance Structures in TCDI and DaYTA

DG formed two advisory boards in the first phase of TCDI: one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one in Zambia. These advisory boards ensure that stakeholders are updated when the program meets key milestones, including when data, needs assessments, and research protocol are validated; the boards also supported the launch of illicit trade studies in the DRC and in Zambia.

DG’s successful implementation of these governance structures in TCDI paved the way for the formation of the following governance bodies to support DaYTA:

• A new Advisory Board in the DRC (building off the one from TCDI),
• The Survey Implementation Group and the Youth Advisory Group in Nigeria, and
• The Research Advisory Committee in Kenya. 

All of these structures have a similar composition and a shared mandate; each one consists of a small group of technical experts who provide technical direction and advice on the research implementation on youth tobacco use in Kenya, Nigeria, and the DRC.

DG also formed a steering committee in the DRC. Its purview is more strategic and less technical relative to the advisory board; it is led by a high-level public official from DRC’s Ministry of Health and includes stakeholders from civil society organizations, government, academia, and partners in tobacco control (like the World Health Organization) who are working to align the research with government policy.

Additionally, to ensure coordination across countries, we also convened a meeting of the full DaYTA consortium with representatives from all three countries—in-person to start, then a mix of virtual and in-person at key program milestones.

These governance structures have proved successful in giving stakeholders a clearly defined space in which to engage—both in a country-specific and cross-country manner. As we’ve implemented and improved our approach to these governance structures across TCDI and DaYTA, we’ve gathered three insights on how these structures can be beneficial for stakeholders and project implementers alike.   

Achieving resilient public procurement goes beyond digitization and automation: data generated through these processes must also be used by government to make smarter decisions – particularly during crisis – and by civil society to hold government accountable for those decisions. With citizens’ lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing emergency response. Open procurement data can help civil society groups detect corruption and monitor the effectiveness of service delivery.

For example, In a bid to expedite PPE procurements and ensure timely availability of critical supplies, many countries moved to direct purchasing avenues that differ from traditional procurement. In some cases, “speed” has led to identified cases of corruption. In South Africa, this led to the government reverting back to its old procurement processes, and taking further steps to curb corruption and rebuild trust. These steps included publishing the identities of all winners of PPE contracts, rationale for selection, and names of losing bidders; the government also plans to publish the shareholder names of winning bidders.

The nature of Covid-19 requires rapid and informed resource allocation. Procurement data can help governments achieve this goal through understanding what priorities are; setting expectations for how much should be spent to achieve priorities; and ensuring suppliers are credible and can deliver.

First: knowing what and who to prioritize enables governments to focus scarce resources on purchasing the most critical items, and delivering them to communities most at risk.

Data from healthcare providers, sub-national and national procurement entities should be aggregated to understand needs and further inform budgeting. Publishing budget information and engaging with civil society can help authorities conduct spot-checks and ensure that funding and services are reaching intended beneficiaries.

Second: to curb price gouging, governments should publish up-to-date price lists for reference and use by all public procuring entities.

For example, as demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) soared in the early days of the crisis, so did PPE prices. Intermediary purchasers also flooded the market, looking to skim off profits by connecting desperate buyers with suppliers. Publishing information on prices, quantities of PPE distributed and engaging with civil society encourage citizens and procurement officers alike to monitor corruption risks.

Third: leveraging market intelligence – using data from existing procurement systems (such as IFMIS) and investing in new data sources – can speed up due diligence processes.

In many countries, procurement systems collect supplier data and efforts can be made to enhance this data to include financial solvency, sector qualifications, beneficial ownership information, and supplier performance evaluation(s). On its own, beneficial ownership data can enable governments to quickly perform minimal standards of due diligence on companies they are buying goods and services from. As well as reducing the immediate risk of corruption, beneficial ownership data provides a valuable trail for future audit.

Fourth: as mentioned throughout, publishing procurement data equips civil society and citizens with the information needed to help combat corruption.

For example, identifying and reporting fraudulent applications for relief funding; monitoring the use (or misuse) of emergency response funds; and reporting counterfeits, frauds, and scams. To enhance citizen oversight, the Government of Paraguay launched a mobile app that notifies users about everything the state procures during the Covid-19 emergency, from tender through award. In Makueni County, Kenya, Development Gateway is supporting the county government in enhancing the Makueni Open Contracting Portal (that publishes data in OCDS) to include Covid-19 procurement data. The County plans to tag all Covid-19 tender data in the system track and analyze this data to inform government decisions, and involve civil society and communities in the improvement of emergency procurement processes.

➙  track supplies needed against supplies procured; ➙  pool purchase orders across government administrations; ➙  identify and select suppliers quickly; ➙  extract contract data for market intelligence; ➙  open data for public oversight and transparency; ➙  protect existing suppliers and long-term economic sustainability.

Finally: while resources to build complex procurement data management systems may be difficult to mobilize, alternative data collection mechanisms can achieve much the same effect.

For example, standardized Excel templates or web forms that can be used to aggregate data from all relevant procurement entities. If open budget portals or websites do not exist, other tools and resources such as the Open Fiscal Data Package standardize the structure and the content of budget data so as to ensure data quality.

Another valuable resource for understanding how to collect and publish Covid-19 data is the Open Contracting Partnership’s guide to Covid-19 procurement data collection, publication, and visualization.

DG and the Global Digital Marketplace Programme’s Covid-19 Emergency Procurement Collaboration

Development Gateway has been working on a project for the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) Global Digital Marketplace Programme and the Prosperity Fund Global Anti-Corruption Programme, led by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), which included the topic of Covid-19 procurement response. This work was completed through a combination of desk research, key informant interviews, and participation in public discussions and forums.

Innovation in Crisis: Creative Solutions to Emergency Procurement

Despite having a federal agency designated to emergency response coordination, the US’s emergency procurement system failed to account for the unprecedented market shocks presented by this pandemic: 1) its global scale, and 2) requirements for social distancing. Without a central purchasing hub or coordinated budget planning, state-level buyers in the United States competed against one another to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Supply chain risk protocols were not in place for local buyers to identify shipping disruptions, meaning city officials in Los Angeles and Boston had to hire private planes to retrieve PPE orders after disruptions to shipping lanes made normal market routes impossible.

Additionally, a majority of worldwide government services and procurement transactions – especially at the state level – are facilitated via face-to-face or paper-based systems. But even without fully-digitized procurement systems, we’ve observed many examples of creative solutions that assist governments in deploying a faster, more equitable pandemic response.

The following is a subset of tools that were launched to help governments navigate the high-risk and volatile Covid-19 market:

In studying these solutions, we made a few key observations:

1. Buying smarter and faster in an emergency requires tradeoffs – and procurement data can help governments make more informed purchasing decisions (the next post in this series will explore this in-depth!)
2. Some rules preserve integrity, but others hamstring response – can any procurement regulations or contract terms become more flexible in crisis?
3. Learning from success or failure can help build more resilient procurement systems – in many ways, Covid-19 can be seen as a “worst case scenario,” and inform priorities for future improvements. Further, although the pandemic is on an unprecedented scale, many user needs and data use cases would hold for any emergency, such as an earthquake.

e-Procurement Is a Means, Not an End

e-Procurement digitizes several phases of the government purchasing process for increased efficiency and time and cost savings, and many public procurement officers are urging their governments to make the shift if they have not already done so.

But it’s important to remember that digitalization in itself is not an end goal. This lesson has been underscored through the experiences of Public Procurement Officers charged with supplying a response to Covid-19. In order for procurement technology to be resilient to market shocks and domestic emergencies, it needs to take a holistic view of user needs.