Written by Raja Rafi Ullah
Edited by Muhammad Ali Ilahi and Eghosa Asemota
Over the past few decades, the role that state institutions play in the implementation of development programs has become increasingly important. For years, policymakers and international development practitioners have expressed how inefficient state institutions have impeded the outcomes of proposed development programs.[1] In many situations, the primary issue is not the lack of resources but rather the ineffective governance of these resources.[2] As a result, donor agencies have started investing in the reform of governance institutions in developing countries. Coordination and liaison with formal governance institutions in the public sector is crucial to the implementation of these externally funded programs. Of these institutions, one central institution is the civil service of a recipient country. An organized, clean, and effective civil service is therefore needed for the successful implementation of development programs..
Nevertheless, in most of the developing world, inefficiency in the public sector is a sad reality.[3] In Bangladesh, for example, the public sector has been described as “politicized, poorly paid and poorly managed.”[4] According to a 2007 World Bank report, civil servants in the country often find themselves at the mercy of the government in power which could transfer or dismiss them at will.[5] Recent initiatives, spearheaded by Bangladesh’s government and backed by foreign organizations such as the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), have helped reform the structure of the country’s public sector. Each of these initiatives aims to build skills and capacities, and introduce ways to make departments in the public sector more effective.
One such initiative is Managing at the Top (MATT), a joint program undertaken by the government of Bangladesh and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). The pilot phase of the program, MATT 1, was implemented in 1999 and ended in 2002. During the first phase, approximately 100 senior civil servants were trained meticulously. Once MATT 1 had been successfully completed, the trained civil servants requested that Bangladesh’s government and DFID scale up the program. MATT 2 was then implemented in 2006 and operated for seven years with the aim of training the top cadre of civil servants in Bangladesh.[6]
An examination of the MATT programs reveals lessons learned and can guide international aid organizations in their quest to achieve similar outcomes throughout the developing world.
Bangladesh’s Managing at the Top (MATT 2) Program
The Managing at the Top (MATT 2) program had two main components: (a) a development program that would train participants to design and implement projects; and (b) MATT 2 consultants would provide “performance-management and strategic planning advice” to Bangladesh’s Ministry of Public Administration (MOPA).[7] The first component of MATT 2 was divided into two implementation phases. During the first phase, trainers provided groups of forty to forty-five civil servants with insight on how to design performance improving projects (PIPs) which they implemented in their line of work in the subsequent months. Each training cycle, lasting a year, aimed to graduate 300 civil servants. During the second phase, high-performing participants were placed into groups of twenty and were trained to develop and implement what were called Super Performance Improvement Projects (SPIPs). These second round SPIPs were conducted at more regional and national levels than the first round PIPs which were largely restricted to the local level.[8] Overall, the MATT 2 program was successful. The implementers of the MATT 2 program measured this success in terms of number of graduates of the programs who had been trained in effective management, policymaking, and implementation. In this sense, the outputs of MATT 2 were significant. By mid-2011, thirty of the fifty Ministries’ secretaries had been trained and, between 2006 and 2011, a total of 1,323 civil servants were trained.[9] By 2011, performance improving projects (PIPs) conducted by MATT 2 trainees at local levels had a 99.9 percent completion rate and about forty second round super performance improvement projects (SPIPSs) were in progress.
MATT Programs: What Worked?
The innovative and responsive design of the MATT 2 program made it effective in the context of an otherwise complicated logistical environment. One of the main features of the program’s design that made it effective was the focus on precision, which led to the creation of actionable policy proposals for PIPs and SPIPs. This precision coupled with the small-scale nature of projects that focused on governance helped institutionalize best practices within departments without significant backlash from current employees. The program was also successful at fostering a sense of teamwork and collaboration among its participants. Both the PIP and SPIP groups were intentionally designed to have a mix of bureaucrats from different levels of the public sector. This helped facilitate the change of strict hierarchical norms that had characterized the bureaucracy in past years and had hampered effective governance, policymaking, and implementation. Senior civil servants were also taught the value of having lower level civil servants express their ideas and how that positively affects the internal dynamics of a unit or department.
Lessons Learned
A number of lessons can be learned from the Managing at the Top (MATT) programs and can help provide guidance for other development programs that intend to reform civil service in similar developing countries. Firstly, civil service reform is a long process and its results will not be achieved overnight, particularly in countries that have de facto institutionalized practices of corruption and misappropriation of funds. One possible way civil service reform can be achieved is through creating programs that specifically train strategically picked civil servants, like in the case of MATT programs, in cutting-edge solutions to the problems that they face in their daily work duties. Since corruption is informally institutionalized in the civil services of many countries, program implementers need to be mindful that there is no guarantee that civil servants trained through these programs will apply newly learned skills when re-immersed into their usual work environments. The program can, however, involve spillover effects that gradually permeate throughout the civil service structure. Training the top cadre of a country’s civil service might not radically minimize corruption and inefficiencies – but, if such programs are able to achieve even minimal impact in the behavior of top civil servants, this can trigger top-to-bottom institutional change in the civil service. The training programs also need to be precise and their objectives need to have clear actionable processes accompanied with quantifiable metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that attest to the achievement of outcomes.
Despite the success of the MATT programs, institutional reform in developing countries is an uphill task that requires constant effort and evaluation. These programs were mostly focused on training the top cadre of the civil servants due to limited resources. Effective training of the junior staff still remains a challenge that requires a more holistic and inclusive approach from the Bangladeshi government along the lines of the DFID Model.
Limitations of Bangladesh’s MATT Programs
Although MATT programs were successful in the number of civil servants they trained, there has not been any successful attempt to measure possible changes in the performance of these civil servants beyond the implementation period of the program. Therefore, the true success of the MATT programs is not yet fully understood. Additionally, sparse evidence is available on how flexible the work settings of these trained graduates have been in allowing them to apply their newly learned skills.
For a more comprehensive view of the impact that MATT programs had, follow-up studies will need to be conducted to evaluate civil servants’ performance and any changes in efficiency for the department as a whole.
References
- Krueger, Anne. 1990. “Government Failures in Development,” Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 9-23. ↑
- Unu.edu. (2019). Governance – United Nations University. [online] Available at: https://unu.edu/governance [Accessed 13 Feb. 2019]. ↑
- Pg. 217, Diaz, Juan José. 2006. “Public Sector Downsizing.” In Aline Coudouel and Stefano Paternostro, eds., Analyzing the Distributional Impact of Reforms: A Practitioner’s Guide to Pension, Health, Labor Markets, Public Sector Downsizing, Taxation, Decentralization, and Macroeconomic Modeling, Vol. 2. Washington, DC: The World Bank. ↑
- Zafarullah, Habib. (2008). Reflections on Civil service Reform in Bangladesh. ↑
- Majeed, Rushda. (2011). “Energizing the Civil Service: Managing at the Top 2, Bangladesh, 2006-2011.” ↑
- Majeed, Rushda. 2011. “Energizing the Civil Service: Managing At The Top 2, Bangladesh 2006-2011” ↑
- Pg. 6, Majeed, Rushda. 2011. “Energizing the Civil Service: Managing At The Top 2, Bangladesh 2006-2011” ↑
- Pg. 6-7, Majeed, Rushda. 2011. “Energizing the Civil Service: Managing At The Top 2, Bangladesh 2006-2011” ↑
- Pg. 13, Majeed, Rushda. 2011. “Energizing the Civil Service: Managing At The Top 2, Bangladesh 2006-2011” ↑
