The Russian state information influence attack against the 2016 US presidential election rattled authorities in Sweden. The Scandinavian country of 10 million was already a frequent target of Kremlin-sponsored disinformation. With a general election approaching in September 2018 and public apprehension about a possible influence attack high, officials at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency began preparing measures to defend the credibility of the country’s electoral process. Rather than attempt to halt the creation and spread of disinformation, the agency aimed to build the resilience of institutions and society overall to withstand information influence activities. The agency trained thousands of civil servants, built and strengthened interagency coordination structures, coordinated with traditional and social media, raised public awareness, and monitored the digital information landscape. Despite a cyberattack on the Swedish Election Authority website that fanned claims of fraud and generated a flood of homegrown political disinformation, the election ran smoothly and the government doubled down on the resilience-building approach for protecting the 2022 election.

Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in October and November 2020. Case published December 2020. The Princeton University Liechtenstein Institute for Self-Determination supported the development of this case study.

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 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. 

After a decade of reforms to boost tax collection, in 2014 the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) faced up to one of its biggest remaining challenges. Although the agency had significantly improved its internal capacity—along with its ability to collect taxes from registered taxpayers—large numbers of Ugandans paid nothing because they were unregistered or because inadequate compliance monitoring enabled them to underpay. The holes in the system undermined public trust and bedeviled the URA’s efforts to meet the government-mandated target to raise tax revenue to 16% of gross domestic product. The URA then joined other government agencies to bring millions of unregistered citizens into the tax net, and it tightened the oversight of existing taxpayers who were paying less than their fair share. Prime targets were millions of Ugandans who worked in the informal economy, which the government said accounted for nearly half of the country’s economic activity. At the same time, the URA set up operations to go after wealthy and politically connected individuals who avoided paying their full tax load, and it created a separate unit to press government departments that failed to remit to the URA the taxes they collected, such as withholdings from employees. The URA’s program achieved strong gains on all three fronts and thereby helped increase the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio to 14.2% in the 2017–18 fiscal year from 11.3% in 2013–14. Just as important, the program made significant progress toward a fairer distribution of the tax burden for Ugandans across all economic levels.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in January and February 2019. Case published April 2019.

To view a short version of the case, please click here 

See related Uganda Revenue Case Study: Righting the Ship: Uganda Overhauls its Tax Agency, 2004-2014

In the early 2000s, the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) faced a crisis. Even after adopting a modernized legal framework that made the agency semiautonomous—able to operate much as a business would, though still accountable to a public board—the institution remained paralyzed by corruption, outdated technologies and procedures, and a toxic organizational culture. In 2004, to begin righting the ship, the URA’s board appointed 43-year-old Allen Kagina, who had served the agency for more than a decade, as the new commissioner general. Kagina engineered a radical overhaul that required all 2,000 URA staff members to reapply for new positions under a revamped organizational structure. A new modernization office overhauled tax procedures, upgraded the URA’s technology, improved anticorruption measures, strengthened the tax investigation and prosecution function, and enhanced staff capacity. At the same time, the URA was working to smooth its customs procedures and improve cooperation with partner countries in the East African Community. 

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in January and February 2019. Case published April 2019.

To view a short version of the case, please click here

See related Uganda Revenue Authority Case Study: Bolstering Revenue, Building Fairness: Uganda Extends its Tax Reach, 2014-2018

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. 

To view a short version of the case, please ckick here

In 2010, the government, private businesses, and local universities in the northern Mexico state of Nuevo León forged an unusual alliance to design and implement sweeping law-enforcement reforms in a challenging context. At the time, powerful drug cartels were fighting increasingly bitter and bloody wars to control their turf—which intimidated an existing police service already hampered by low pay, weak morale, corruption, and disorganization. Public confidence in the state’s ability to maintain order had evaporated. During the next five years, the public–private partnership oversaw the creation of an entirely new police service that, in tandem with other reforms, significantly strengthened the state’s capacity to ensure public safety and helped rebuild public confidence.

Patrick Signoret drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in March and April 2018 and on earlier research carried out by Ariana Markowitz and Alejandra Rangel Smith in October 2014. New York University’s Marron Institute helped support Alejandra Rangel Smith’s participation. Case published July 2018.

After the 1994 genocide that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Rwanda’s tax collection collapsed to $132 million in 1996 from $225 million in 1990. Aside from its desperate need for money to pay for reconstruction, the new unity government, led by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, was also determined to break its dependence on foreign donors by becoming entirely self-funding. To do that, Kagame’s government had to convince a traumatized and distrustful public to pay its fair share of taxes. In 1998, the government replaced the existing tax and customs departments with the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA), a semiautonomous tax agency. The RRA overhauled tax collection procedures, increased staff capacity, improved information management, and launched a massive and sustained public education campaign in an effort to build a new social contract. As a result, in 2017 Rwanda collected in three weeks the same amount of tax it had collected annually a dozen years earlier. From 1998 to 2017, Rwanda’s tax-to-GDP ratio improved from 10.8% to 16.7%, and total tax revenues collected grew more than 10-fold to $1.3 billion. Moreover, from 2007 to 2017 alone, the number of registered taxpayers grew 13-fold—from 26,526 to 355,128—though Rwanda was one of the world’s poorest countries and most of its labor force of 6.3 million still had incomes below the threshold that made them tax eligible. By 2017, the government financed 62% of its annual budget from domestic tax revenues, up from just 39% in 2000. The country was on its way to ending donor dependence.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kigali, Rwanda in March 2018. Case published May 2018.

To view a short version of the case, please click here

In 2014, an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea shined a harsh spotlight on global capacity to deal effectively with a fast-moving epidemic that crossed international borders.  By the end of July, the outbreak had started to overwhelm health care systems in all three affected countries. In Liberia, health centers began to close, and President Ellen Sirleaf appealed for help from the United States. President Barack Obama tasked USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) to lead an interagency response. From early August 2014 to January 2016, an OFDA Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART, deployed to Liberia to help coordinate efforts to stop the spread of infection. The DART was the first to involve a large-scale partnership with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to combat an infectious disease outbreak. Although the deployment, which scaled up earlier assistance, took place five months after the first reported cases and required extensive adaptation of standard practices, it succeeded in helping bring the epidemic under control: the total number of people infected—28,616—was well below the potential levels predicted by the CDC’s models. This US–focused case study highlights the challenges of making an interagency process work in the context of an infectious disease outbreak in areas where health systems are weak.

Jennifer Widner drafted this case study based on interviews from August 2016 to August 2017. The case is part of a series about the Liberian response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, available through the Innovations for Successful Societies website. Case published June 2018. IBM’s Center for The Business of Government helped finance this case study.

The report “Responding to Global Health Crises: Lessons from the U.S. Response to the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola Outbreak” is a version of the “All Hands on Deck” case produced in partnership with the IBM Center for The Business of Government. 

The DART was the first to involve a large-scale partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to combat an infectious disease outbreak. Although the deployment, which scaled up earlier assistance, took place five months after the first reported cases and required extensive adaptation of standard practices, it succeeded in helping bring the epidemic under control: the total number of people infected—28,616—was well below the potential levels predicted by the CDC’s models. This U.S.—focused case study highlights the challenges of making an interagency process work in the context of an infectious disease outbreak in areas where health systems are weak.

For more information on the IBM Center for The Business of Government, please visit: www.businessofgovernment.org