Public Digital's Blog: Why metrics matter in Digital Public Infrastructure
Earlier this month, Public Digital attended the Global DPI summit in Cairo, which showcased the rapid advancements in the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) sector. A key challenge discussed was defining and measuring DPI impact, crucial for justifying investments and ensuring public value. Public Digital’s Director of Strategy and Research highlighted the importance of user-centric metrics and overcoming cultural and mindset barriers in governments. The summit emphasized starting small, testing, and iterating to build effective digital public services. The event underscored the need for a culture that measures the right things to realize DPI’s potential.
Read MoreCABRI: Enhancing Digital Public Financial Management (PFM) in Africa: Unpacking common challenges and approaches
CABRI recently launched a new area of work: Enhancing Digital PFM in Africa, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The introductory webinar saw participation from 15 African countries, and heard experiences from Rwanda, Benin and South Africa’s experience digitalising their PFM systems. The discussion highlighted key challenges faced by African countries attempting to strengthen these systems: managing, maintaining or retiring legacy systems; overspecification of system requirements; ill-suited and inflexible procurement policies; and stakeholder resistance. These lessons will guide CABRI’s new workstream on Enhancing Digital PFM.
Read MoreGovTech: Fiscal Data Governance
The workshop will address the importance of reliable fiscal statistics and fiscal reporting and their influence on policy choices and policy assessments. It will give the insight into the link between high quality data and accounting as a feed to the costing and benchmarking process and address the significance of consistency and comparability of fiscal reports.
Read MoreImproved Fiscal Data in Bangladesh for a Transparent and Accountable Public Sector
Fiscal transparency and accountability are crucial for achieving macroeconomic stability, improving credit ratings, reducing public debt and deficits, lowering corruption, and fostering economic growth, all of which are essential for good governance. In Bangladesh, the fiscal data ecosystem faces challenges such as inconsistent data from key suppliers, issues with accounting practices, and delays in data reporting, which hinder transparency and can lead to corruption. Despite these challenges, there has been notable progress over the past decade. Moving forward, improvements in the availability, accessibility, agility, and accuracy of fiscal data are needed to enhance the ecosystem further.
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