In early 2008, Zubair Bhatti, administrative head of the Jhang district in Pakistan’s Punjab province, recognized the need to reduce petty corruption in the local civil service—a problem that plagued not only Punjab but also all of Pakistan. He began to contact citizens on their cell phones to learn about the quality of the service they had received. Those spot checks became the basis for a social audit system that spanned all 36 districts in Punjab by 2014. The provincial government outsourced much of the work to a call center, which surveyed citizens about their experiences with 16 different public services. The data from that call center helped district coordination officers identify poorly performing employees and branches, thereby enhancing the capability of the government to improve service delivery. By early 2014, the province was sending about 12,000 text messages daily to check on service quality. More than 400,000 citizens provided information between the beginning of the initiative and 2014. Known as the Citizen Feedback Monitoring Program, the Punjab’s social audit system became the template for similar innovations in other provinces and federal agencies in Pakistan.

Mohammad Omar Masud drafted this case based on interviews conducted in Punjab, Pakistan, in January and March 2014. Case published February 2015.

Note: This case study was previously titled "Calling the Public to Empower the State: Pakistan's Citizen Feedback Monitoring Program, 2008-2014."

When Bitange Ndemo became permanent secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communications in 2005, he was well aware of the difficulty Kenyans faced when they tried to get information from the government. He knew that easier access to government data on topics ranging from demographics to education could help spur innovation in business and technology and help drive the country’s economic growth. The Official Secrets Act under former President Daniel arap Moi had long prevented civil servants from sharing government data, and for the most part, the trend had continued since the 2002 election of President Mwai Kibaki. But in 2011, Ndemo won Kibaki’s approval to create an Internet portal that would serve as a one-stop shop for government census, economic, health and education data. With Kibaki’s support, Ndemo persuaded other ministries to allow access to the data, and he assembled a volunteer task force of computer programmers, data experts and ministry and World Bank officials to build the website and upload information. After the site—opendata.go.ke­—went online in July 2011, the ministry started taking crucial steps to ensure the system’s effectiveness by training journalists in how to use the data in their reporting, by encouraging software developers to build applications that manipulated the data to explore trends, and by working to streamline the continuing flow of information to the site from government institutions. The case highlights Ndemo’s efforts to open Kenya’s government to the country’s citizens and the world.