Narrowing the gap between rich and poor was a top priority for Teresa Surita, five-time mayor of Boa Vista, Brazil. Surita had long viewed early childhood development services as crucial for improving life chances and attaining that goal, and she had partnered with several programs to expand parent coaching and other opportunities. As her fifth term began in 2017, she turned to a program called Urban95, which called for making a top priority the needs of young children and their families in all of the city’s planning and programs. Building on work the city had already done, Surita and her department heads undertook projects that included adapting a neighborhood to the needs of young children and their caregivers and building a cutting-edge data dashboard and alert system designed to ensure citizens would get help when they needed it. The city sought to keep those efforts on track while also extending assistance to families among the refugees fleeing deprivation and violence in neighboring Venezuela. As the term of the initial phase drew to a close in September 2019, municipal officials began to take stock of progress and results. Despite some philosophical disagreements and some uncertainties about the future of vital federal funding, the city was on track to achieve its project goals. 

Bill Steiden drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Boa Vista and Sao Paulo, Brazil, in July and August 2019. Case published October 2019. The Bernard van Leer Foundation supported this case study to foster early-stage policy learning.

In the early 2010s in Tel Aviv, parents with children under four years of age were mostly on their own when it came to finding the child care services and support they needed. Although the city was an economic and technology powerhouse, the government showed little interest in providing for the youngest residents. Public concern about the cost and quality of day care and a shortage of opportunities to ensure infants and toddlers thrived drew parents into the streets. In 2016, the city began to respond. Municipal departments expanded services, launched a digital platform for parents, and renovated public spaces to suit children three years old and younger. By 2019, early childhood development had become a government priority and part of the mayor’s reelection campaign platform, although scaling services to some of the poorest neighborhoods remained a challenge.

Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Tel Aviv in May 2019. The Bernard van Leer Foundation sponsored this case study to support learning in its Urban95 initiative. Savvas Verdis and Philipp Rode of the London School of Economics served as independent reviewers. Case published August 2019. 

In 2017, Geraldo Julio, the mayor of Recife, Brazil, heard scientific evidence that ensuring children from birth to age six years got a better start in life resulted in long-term benefits such as improved health, more-effective learning, less likelihood of criminal involvement, and increased employability. Julio, a technically-oriented leader in his second and final term, saw investment in early childhood development as an innovative strategy for addressing chronic crime and economic inequality in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. To enable parents and young children to move more safely and more quickly to locations where they could find efficiently clustered resources would require the city to align efforts in several city departments, including parks, public works, health, and education. Julio set up a management team and a steering committee to guide that work and won passage of legislation that authorized him to devote municipal resources and grant funding from private groups to the new strategy. The city engaged an existing public–private urban planning partnership to launch and manage pilot projects in two poor but contrasting neighborhoods: one where homes clung to steep, slide-prone hillsides and another where many residents lived in stilt houses on flood-prone riverbanks. It collaborated with a community peace center that could reach target neighborhoods effectively. Further, the mayor’s teams helped municipal departments start projects that would support the new agenda. In mid 2019, nearly two years after the program began, the pilot projects yielded key lessons about how to improve access to services for families with young children. 

Bill Steiden drafted this case study with the help of Sam Dearden based on interviews conducted in Recife, Brazil, in March and May 2019. Case published June 2019. The Bernard van Leer Foundation sponsored this case study, which is part of a series, to support learning in the early stages of its Urban95 program. Savvas Verdis and Philipp Rodeof the London School of Economics served as independent reviewers. 

In 2009, South Africa's health-funding system teetered on the verge of collapse. Despite the adoption of a transparent and credible budget framework in 1994, large parts of the public health system suffered from chronic overspending and poor financial control. As wage hikes and supply costs ate into the health budget and as government revenues plummeted in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the national health department had to find ways to preserve priorities, linking them more effectively to the budget. The department won agreement on a list of non-negotiable expenditure items to protect in provincial budgets, used earmarked conditional grants to channel funds to key programs, cut medicine costs by improving central procurement, rolled out a new information technology system, and improved its monitoring of provincial finances. Although the country's nine provincial health departments had important roles to play, most of them struggled. However, the Western Cape was able to set a model by controlling personnel costs, improving monitoring, and creating incentives for health facilities to collect fees. Nationally, total per-capita government revenues dropped by 5% in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and grew only slowly thereafter, but the health sector's strategy helped ensure progress on its key priorities even as resources fluctuated.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Pretoria and Cape Town, South Africa, in August 2018. Case published October 2018.

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Rwanda’s public health system was among the many casualties of the country’s 1994 genocide. In the aftermath of the violence, health workers were in short supply, maternal and child mortality rates spiked, and infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDs and tuberculosis often went untreated. By 2011, Rwanda had made enormous progress in remedying the situation, but much more remained to be done. From 2011 to 2016, officials in the finance ministry and health ministry worked together to develop five-year plans for public health, translate their new priorities into annual budgets, and monitor spending so as to ensure progress toward national goals. They revised the budget calendar to improve the planning process, helped local authorities build medium-term public-health strategies, and refined the tools used for tracking spending in the health sector. They met or surpassed more than half of the top targets they set for 2015, cementing the gains Rwanda had made since 1994.

Simon Engler drafted this case study with the assistance of Louise Umutoni Bower, based on interviews conducted in Kigali, Rwanda in March, April and August 2018. Case published September 2018.

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As Vietnam gradually became a middle-income country during the early 2000s, its tax agency struggled to keep up. In the decade and a half following the Communist Party–led government’s 1986 decision to establish a market-based economy, local entrepreneurs launched businesses, foreign investors poured into the country, and the average annual rate of economic growth soared to 7.5%. But during the same period, tax revenues declined as the General Department of Taxation (GDT), which previously collected almost all of the country’s taxes from a small group of state-owned enterprises, strove to keep pace with the economic dynamism. In 2004, the department established an internal reform team and adopted a strategy to make sure those who could pay covered their fair share of the cost of government services. The GDT worked with the finance ministry’s tax policy department and the parliament to implement a raft of legal changes. The department then reorganized each of its 758 tax offices along functional lines, rolled out a new IT system, improved staff training, and created a unit to bolster taxpayer compliance. It later adopted a personal income tax and tried—sometimes unsuccessfully—to close exemptions created earlier to attract foreign investors. Although its collection levels began to plateau after 2010, in the decade or so from 2004 to 2015 the GDT increased the number of registered taxpayers in the country to 15 million from 2 million and tripled the amount of taxes it collected annually, maintaining one of the highest tax-to-GDP ratios in East Asia.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study on the basis of interviews conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam in May 2018. Case published in August 2018. 

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Indonesia’s 2014 presidential election opened a new era in the country’s political life. For the first time since 1998, when a 30-year period of authoritarian rule ended, a popularly elected president completed two full terms in office and ceded power to a successor from a different political party. The transition tested the leadership of the outgoing president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose cabinet included opponents of his elected successor, Joko Widodo. Governor of Jakarta and a former mayor, Jokowi, as the incoming president was popularly known, faced a steep learning curve, but Yudhoyono’s cooperation eased the challenge. The director of Yudhoyono’s innovative delivery unit, Kuntoro Magusubroto, worked with Jokowi’s transition team. The unit prepared reports and briefings that gave the incoming Jokowi team an overview of key policies and programs. Other ministries provided briefings that varied in depth. The cooperative tone of the 2014 transition was a welcome departure from prior divisive handovers. Nonetheless, as of 2016, there was still a need to adjust the timing of the five-year plan with regard to the transition period as well as provide a legal basis for transferring information between incumbent ministers and incoming government officers.

Robert Joyce drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Jakarta in May 2016. Case published August 2016.

In the wake of the 2011 civil uprising that toppled a longtime dictator, Tunisia’s transitional government struggled to meet citizens’ demands for economic opportunity. Interim Finance Minister Jaloul Ayed saw limited access to financial services as a barrier to building the private sector and creating jobs, but the microfinance industry was overregulated and dominated by a majority-state-owned bank that loaned government funds to nonprofit associations, which in turn loaned to clients at unsustainably low rates. Ayed and his deputy, Emna Kallel, crafted a strategy to expand small businesses’ and entrepreneurs’ access to loans by revising requirements and opening the door to private-sector lenders under the watch of a new supervisory authority. The law upended the existing microfinance industry, creating new opportunities but also disrupting the government-funded associations. Four years later, uncertainties remained, but Tunisia’s microfinance sector had begun to move toward a market-based system under a new regulatory environment that allowed for the industry’s future expansion.  

Robert Joyce, ISS Research Specialist, and Natalie Wenkers of Science Po's Paris School of International Affairs, drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Tunis, Tunisia, during September and October 2015. This case study was funded by the French Development Agency. Case published in February 2016.