When Troy Schulte took over as interim city manager of Kansas City, Missouri, in 2009, the local economy was struggling and the government faced hard choices about how to use scarce resources. With a slashed budget and a diminished workforce, Schulte had to figure out how to deliver city services without reducing quality. Together with a small team of employees, he began to create a culture of data-driven decision making in municipal offices, to invest selectively in technology, and to give nonprofit organizations and firms an opportunity to develop their own, innovative solutions to city problems by making more information available to them. Schulte found a kindred spirit in Mayor Sly James, who negotiated a public–private partnership with a view to developing what Kansas City’s chief innovation officer called “the smartest 54 blocks in the country” along the city’s new streetcar corridor. As initial efforts came to a close and a new mayor entered office, Schulte and other officials stepped back to assess what they had learned. The new, data-driven culture had yielded positive improvements, whereas the technology-based smart-city initiative had had a more limited impact—at least in the shorter term. The experience generated important lessons about the scale of the benefits that technology could generate in midsize cities and in what kind of time frame.

Tyler McBrien drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kansas City, Missouri, in January 2020. Case published March 2020.

In 2005, Vietnam’s legislature voted to develop a new health insurance system that would reduce most citizens’ out-of-pocket health-care costs and instructed the health ministry to take steps to make care more accessible, more affordable, and more effective—especially for those who lived in remote, mountainous regions. One of the challenges was how to manage scarce resources in order to constrain soaring costs. Another was how to coordinate with provinces and local governments (districts and communes)—which controlled much of the country’s health-care spending—in order to achieve national priorities, such as improved preventive care. During the next several years, the health ministry’s Department of Planning and Finance worked with those subnational units to improve the financial information system, hone strategies and plans, and align activities. By 2014, Vietnam’s government had more than tripled its per-capita health-care spending—to US$48.82 in 2014 from US$15.52 per capita in 2005, in current US dollars—a rate of growth that outpaced the average in both low-income and lower-middle-income countries. Although the ministry still struggled to keep patients’ costs down, the share of out-of-pocket spending fell to 45% in 2015 from 67% in 2005, according to government figures.

ISS staff members drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam by Simon Engler and Huong Dang in May, June, and August 2018. Case published in May 2019. This case is part of an ISS series on linking health priorities to the budget process.

Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health was struggling to meet its goals in 2014 despite impressive gains in the health of its citizens during the previous 20 years. A new minister and his leadership team reached out for ideas by engaging Ethiopia’s regions, districts, and communities—an essential step in a large and ethnically diverse society. They then developed an ambitious transformation program to help realize the government’s national aspirations for health care, including commitments made to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. To bring their vision to fruition, however, the minister and his team had to link priorities to the budget process and use the health budget as a management tool. The ministries of health and finance matched goals and targets to available resources and worked to create actionable plans. And health officials took steps to build cooperation and extend coordination at every level of government in Ethiopia’s federal system. Technical and capacity constraints—plus unexpected political upheaval beginning in late 2015—slowed implementation, but in 2018 a new administration was taking steps to address those challenges.

Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2018. Case published January 2019.

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When Pete Buttigieg became mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2012, the city was struggling to overcome its image as a dying community. More than a thousand abandoned homes blighted urban neighborhoods, and the unemployment rate was more than 10%. Although these problems had their roots in the changing structure of the US economy, Buttigieg said he believed that more-efficient and more-effective government could help the city attract new businesses and residents, charting a path forward. In 2013, he hired Santiago Garces, a 2011 graduate of nearby University of Notre Dame, to create a new office that would identify opportunities for improving city operations and saving money. On a tight budget, Garces assembled a small team of business analysts, who used new technologies to help streamline and modernize the city’s code enforcement department, greatly accelerating the process of dealing with abandoned homes. Garces’s team then took on dozens of other projects to improve service delivery while also consolidating the city’s information technology resources, including outsourcing certain services to cut costs. The unit Garces created produced millions of dollars in savings during its first years and helped the mayor achieve some of his top policy goals. 

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews he and Steven S. Strauss, John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor at Princeton University, conducted in South Bend, Indiana in July 2018. Case published September 2018.

In late 2015, Liberia’s newly appointed education minister, George Werner, recognized that the government school system was wasting money and failing its students. Shortly before Werner assumed office, a pilot project had identified significant numbers of ghost workers (teachers who never showed up for their jobs or were fraudulently included on the payroll) as well as teachers who lacked even basic qualifications. Although the project covered just three of Liberia’s 15 counties (the most populous counties of Montserrado, Nimba, and Bong), the findings illuminated a long-standing national problem. Resolving to put an end to the abuses, Werner and senior ministry officials created a program implementation unit dedicated to the nationwide project, refined vetting procedures for assessing qualifications, and introduced mandatory competency testing that laid the foundation for additional reforms. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf provided crucial political support when the project ran into resistance from the national teachers’ association. By February 2018, the education ministry had removed 83% of the 2,046 ghost teachers, and planned to remove the remaining 17% that it identified during the last six months of the project. Overall, the project generated $2.3 million in annual savings that opened spaces for new teachers in the school system and budget, with the ministry expecting that this number would increase to $3.1 million once all ghost teachers were gone. As a result of the project, the ministry hired 1,371 trained new graduate teachers. Still, challenges remained: 49% of public school teachers had failed the competency tests. Armed with this important baseline data, the ministry had to decide what to do to improve teacher quality.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study with assistance from Blaykyi Kenyah based on interviews conducted in Monrovia, Liberia, in August 2017. Case published February 2018.

In 1999, eight years after emerging from decades of Soviet domination, Kyrgyzstan began an ambitious effort to officially recognize property ownership throughout the country and lay the groundwork for a vibrant real estate market. During five and a half decades of rule by the Soviet Union, citizens were not allowed to own land, and after Kyrgyzstani independence in 1991, the country began a nationwide program of privatization in a bid to stimulate economic development. The question was how to register and document property rights so that people could transact efficiently in a new land market. To meet the challenge, a new land agency, known as Gosregister, had to hire and train staff in completely new responsibilities, establish performance management and funding structures, improve efficiency by introducing new technologies, and ensure that staff did not engage in corruption. Despite political upheaval—including the overthrow of two governments in the space of five years—Gosregister steadily built its capacity and evolved into an effective land registry. By 2012, the agency had registered 92% of the country’s privately held parcels, and in 2017, the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings recognized its services as among the best in the world.

Maya Gainer drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Bishkek and Kant, Kyrgyzstan, during November and December 2016. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published February 2017

In 2001, registering or transferring land in Jamaica was an uphill battle. Four separate departments handled different aspects of land administration, leading to weak coordination and delay. Even straightforward transactions dragged on for weeks, simply getting information was a struggle, and fraud was commonplace. In April of that year, Jamaica established the National Land Agency, charged with merging the four departments, speeding up services, and improving their quality. As the new agency’s CEO, Elizabeth Stair led a team of managers that had to oversee the consolidation, design systems to prevent fraud, improve performance, and implement new procedures and technologies to increase speed and transparency. During its first decade and a half of operation, the National Land Agency significantly reduced processing times and won acclaim for its customer service and innovative use of technology. Despite these successes, there was still room to improve land tenure security. Stiff documentation requirements, high costs, and limited awareness of the process meant that registration and related services remained out of reach for many Jamaicans.

Lessons Learned

• Advantages of functional consolidation. Merging four divisions into a single semi-autonomous agency allowed the government to streamline service delivery, standardize procedures, and reduce processing times.
• Overcoming resistance and curbing graft. A strong, unified management team and a consistent message helped answer internal opposition and external critics of the transition. Staff retraining, individualized targets for performance tied to financial incentives, and new procedures and technologies helped establish a new operational culture.
• Additional barriers remain. Despite the agency’s successes, Jamaica’s overall experience also demonstrates the range of additional barriers to land registration, including stiff documentation requirements, high costs in the form of fees and taxes, and limited awareness of the requirements, that can prevent many property owners from formalizing their claims.

Maya Gainer drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kingston, Jamaica, in June 2016. The Omidyar Network funded the development of this case study. Case published January 2017.

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of Elizabeth Stair - CEO and Commissioner of Lands, Jamaican National Land Agency.