News and Events

Speech

Email this page   Print this page

Bindu N. Lohani
Director General
RSDD

13 July 2006
Auditorium A, ADB Headquarters
Manila, Philippines

Honorable Metro Manila Development Authority Chairman Bayani Fernando, Dr. Samuel Paul of the Public Affairs Centre in Bangalore, India, distinguished participants, colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen:

Let me extend a very warm welcome to all of you on behalf of the Asian Development Bank, and I offer special thanks to the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines and the Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration as co-organizers of this event.

Making services work for the people - particularly the poor and the historically disadvantaged groups - is one of the major challenges that confront developing countries worldwide. Living conditions are generally poor with large sections of the population having limited access to quality and affordable basic services such as health, education, water, and sanitation. Over the years, service delivery has been weighed down by a host of factors such as weak regulatory frameworks, institutional rigidities, poor public accountability systems, leakages in resource management, and lack of capable workforce.

A significant part of the work of the Asian Development Bank is therefore focused at improving the delivery of services in developing member countries. Hence, the Asian Development Bank supports public investments programs and projects aimed improving the capacities of institutions involved in the service delivery chain. It is within this context that the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank Institute jointly invested in development of two e-learning toolkits for improving transparency and accountability in the delivery of services, namely the Citizen Report Card or CRC methodology and the Continuous Improvement and Benchmarking or CIB techniques.

The CRC methodology and CIB techniques have been acknowledged as international leading practices in improving service delivery. Both CRC and CIB have enabled service delivery improvements in government institutions and private organizations in many countries.

CRC is concerned with strengthening citizens’ voice and holding public service providers to account that result in an effective and constructive process of dialogue and partnership action between and among stakeholders to improve services.

CIB offers powerful techniques to introduce and manage change in organizations. CIB provide practical and systematic methods for analyzing processes and systems as well as collecting information to raise service standards and, ultimately to improve the quality of services.

The CRC and CIB e-learning toolkits contain easy to understand and self-paced learning modules that should enable users to develop the basic competencies to successfully apply CRC methodology and CIB techniques in actual service delivery environments.

Today’s launch of the e-learning toolkits is part of a bigger initiative being supported by the Bank through a regional technical assistance project to develop regional knowledge and capacity for improving the delivery of services. The initiative includes disseminating the e-learning toolkits to different stakeholders and to use them in teaching, training, and, more importantly, in actual programs and projects to improve the access to and quality of public services. It is likewise envisaged that critical masses of change advocates will be created and capacitated to put lead the implementation and institutionalization of the governance reform initiatives.

I am very much looking forward to the outcomes of this event. Once again, my sincerest gratitude to the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines and the Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration for your valuable assistance in putting this launch together and providing such a broad and high level of participation.

Thank you very much.