Until 2001, Morocco’s Caisse Nationale de Sécurité Sociale (CNSS, or National Social Security Fund) did its job unevenly, inefficiently, and, critics said, often unfairly. Although the fund was meant to provide insurance for all private sector employees, it covered only about half of them. It had no proper accounting and was mismanaged and corrupt to the extent that it had lost the trust of companies, workers, and politicians. In 2001, the CNSS’s new director general, Mounir Chraïbi, moved to improve service delivery and increase enrollment in response to a parliamentary investigation committee report that had revealed the agency’s shortcomings. Chraïbi and his successor, Saïd Ahmidouch, reorganized the CNSS to enhance accountability and efficiency, rebuilt the staff to raise skill levels, introduced an electronic system for handling many of the fund’s interactions with businesses, and changed the design of the auditing process. By 2010, when Ahmidouch implemented the final measures of the reform plan, the agency had sharply increased its enrollment of private sector companies and their employees and regained the trust of its partners.

In 2003, the new governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil, pledged to improve government efficiency and serve citizens better. Residents of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s fourth-largest state by area and second largest by population, had long bemoaned the difficulty of obtaining such vital documents as work permits, passports, and driver’s licenses, which are issued by a variety of federal, state, and local agencies. In 1996, the state government tried to solve the problem by experimenting with 26 one-stop shops that integrated related citizen services under a single roof, but the shops failed to reduce delay and confusion. From 2007 to 2010, the governor and his reform team restructured and expanded the one-stop shops. The reform team persuaded multiple levels of the government to cooperate more closely, revamped management practices, improved the physical appearance and organization of facilities, streamlined procedures, and installed an electronic monitoring system. Renamed integrated citizen assistance units (unidades de atendimento integrado), the new one-stop shops improved services, reduced delays, and sharply increased processing volume. In 2011, the team outsourced the management of six of the one-stop shops to a private company monitored by the state. The public-private experiment cut per-unit operating costs by 31%. By 2012, 30 one-stop shops were handling more than 6 million citizen transactions annually—more than seven times the annual volume in 2009. By bringing together diverse agencies from multiple levels of government, Minas Gerais was able to greatly improve the reach and efficiency of its citizen services.

 

 

During the 1990s, conflict of interest scandals in Brazil weakened public trust in civil servants and rendered many competitive processes like procurement, privatization and employment inefficient and ineffective. In 1999, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso created a Public Ethics Commission to confront these problems. Led by João Geraldo Piquet Carneiro, a Brazilian lawyer, the commission developed and implemented the Code of Conduct for Senior Government Officials. Piquet first focused on the upper echelons of the civil service— public sector managers and highly visible presidential appointees. For the first time in Brazilian politics, specific rules set public standards on conflicts of interest. Within 10 days of taking office, senior civil servants had to agree in writing to adhere to the code and submit forms detailing personal and family assets. Piquet and his team developed procedures for detecting and addressing violations. The commission avoided a backlash by walking a tightrope between being a watchdog and working with senior civil servants to help separate personal and public interests. By the end of Piquet’s tenure in 2004, the commission had set a precedent. According to interviewees, norms in the upper echelons of Brazil’s federal government had changed, and senior government officials no longer had an assumed impunity. However, critics noted that the commission’s success hinged on presidential support, as the commission lost much of its momentum under the administration of Cardoso’s successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

 

 

Associated Interview(s):  Marcílio Marques Moreira, João Geraldo Piquet Carneiro

 

 

Associated Interview(s):  Kithinji Kiragu, Priscus Kiwango, Benjamin Mkapa, Denyse Morin, Rakesh Rajani, Joseph Rugumyamheto, Eric Shitindi, George Yambesi