Whole-of-Government Innovation in Sierra Leone: The Challenges to Human-Centered Design in Governance Innovation
Author: Mariama N’Diaye, Morningside Academy of Design and MIT GOV/LAB Fellow, MIT DUSP and MIT Sloan Dual Graduate Student.
Editing: Will Sullivan, Independent Editor; Carlos Centeno, Associate Director, Innovation; Seongkyul Park, Project Manager
This case study follows the decisions of mid-level and senior leadership within the government of Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI) and Ministry of Finance to digitize its payment processing system. The process of implementing the payment processing system illuminates the challenges and opportunities that bureaucrats face when developing and sustaining whole-of-government tech solutions and institutionalizing a public innovation team.
Dive deeper into this case here.
At the end of a two-year process that was meant to take less than a year, the digitized version of the paper-based payment processing system struggled to reach its desired uptake. After implementing a human-centered design process, the DSTI team struggled to adapt to a highly rigid, national-level, bureaucratic environment to address both the infrastructural and engagement challenges that arise in resource-constrained contexts.
This case study provides an example of governance innovation in a sub-Saharan African country and the managerial challenges that government innovation teams face in resource-constrained contexts. This case study follows Bineta Diop, the Project lead for EPETS-1 — a partnership with the Ministry of Finance aimed to transform the Ministry’s expenditure management system such that ministries would switch from submitting their annual budget manually to digitally.
Part I: Understanding the Problem
EPETS-1 was a partnership with the Ministry of Finance aimed to transform the Ministry’s expenditure management system such that ministries would switch from submitting their annual budget manually to digitally. This is part I of a series on Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI) focused on the first two phases of its EPETS-1 Project — Discovery and Paint Point Identification.
The Ministry of Finance approached DSTI in 2018 with the question — how can you help us digitize our payment processing systems to be used across the Government so that we can become more efficient and more transparent?
This process required inputs from several members of each ministry, including program managers, budget Officers, and ministers. Most of this process had been paper-based, except for the Ministry of Finance, which had a server-based platform, or an Integrated Financial Management and Information System (IFMIS). This platform served as a database primarily for file management and storage. For all other aspects of this process, the ministries built their budgets through conversations and back-and-forth editing of Word documents, physically signing these documents, and emailing (or sometimes manually transporting) them to the Ministry of Finance.
Many challenges arose with this process, the most notable being teh length of time for completion and file mismanagement. Tasima Joh, the Director of Budget for the Ministry of Finance, explained “we were hoping that by partnering with DSTI, we could build a web-based platform so that directors were able to work from anywhere, and we could reduce delays with ministries asking and processing their requests.” The Ministry of Finance hoped a digital system would provide a clear paper trail and eliminate constant follow-ups to find documents previously submitted. The system’s success could provide DSTI with a case study on how to make government processes both more efficient and transparent, serving not only civil servants but the entire nation.
After receiving the request from the Ministry of Finance, senior leaders of DSTI approached Bineta Diop to lead this project. Diop joined DSTI just after it had launched in 2018 as an intern, eagerly expecting to shape their work, as well as the organization. She worked her way up to Business Analyst within her first year at DSTI. Diop had already supported several other projects in Process Management across various government ministries and agencies, notably researching existing processes, identifying and analyzing gaps, and recommending tech interventions. She was excited to dive into a project that was in the Finance realm. Diop and her team were optimistic about how long the project would take, while also recognizing that the EPETS-1 project was new terrain for them.
“We thought it would take about a month to do our research”, Diop stated.
The confidence was in part because DSTI from its inception committed to using a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach to their work, which the team hoped would make the project not only more efficient but center users throughout the design process. For this project, they applied the following HCD roadmap to guide them throughout the process: 1) Discovery, 2) Pain Point Identification, 3) Design, 4) Development, and then 5) Implementation.
The goal was to conclude the Initial Discovery and Pain Points in one month, the design phase in three months, and the Development and Implementation phase in three months. Diop and her team were optimistic that they could complete the entire project within seven months. This was in part aspirational and in part a sense of urgency felt from the Ministry of Finance. There was a clear misalignment with their expectations and the reality on the ground. The process took longer: The team worked from 2018 to 2020 to build out the platform, and by December, 2020 EPETS-1 had been rolled out in all 29 ministries. In the past, projects led by Ministries across the Sierra Leonean federal government were created in vacuums with a select handful of Senior Leaders dictating the process, the design, and its implementation.
DSTI tasked Diop and her team with creating a technological innovation with 469 potential users across 29 ministries, and 128 potential users across Departments and Agencies (EPETS-1 Internal Report). From Diop’s perspective, she had to find a way to facilitate the creation of a platform that would be useful to almost 500 people and simplify a rather arduous process that has been in existence for decades.
Diop did not want to speak only to a small group of leaders from the Ministry of Finance. She wanted to somehow find a way to build with those 469 potential users as opposed to exclusively for them.
However, despite the thoughtful thinking behind this engagement process they later realized that the HCD approach did not take into account the highly rigid bureaucratic environments and the impact it would have on the EPETS-1 project.
Discovery Phase:
Learning The Current Ways of Doing
As part of the Discovery phase, she mapped out the current expenditure payment process. Diop, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, developed a list of critical stakeholders involved in the expenditure payment processing system. With limited time and personnel capacity, Bineta and her team were not able to engage with all 469 potential users. She had to narrow down the list to those who she believed could provide a comprehensive understanding of the process.
This is a critical challenge for those seeking to create new tech with many users — Who do I talk to? Who do I defer to, to help me choose people to speak to when I am not completely familiar with the process? What will I lose by not speaking to certain people? How do I make those not spoken to feel included? All of these were questions Diop thought about but could not fully address these challenges.
The list was primarily developed by the Ministry of Finance since they stated they knew who all of the key players were across the ministries.
Pain Point Identification phase:
Identifying the Challenges in the Current Process
Diop quickly realized through conversations that there were too many different processes across ministries dealing with the same form, and none of these processes were documented. The differences ranged from how they requested budget allocation to when they submitted their documents to how documents were tracked internally. She had to do a lot more interviews and some back-and-forth to validate what she was being told and to make sure she got the process documented correctly.
Diop noted through her conversations that there was a fear of retribution or hesitancy that any information shared would be valuable amongst mid-level and technical staff. Diop over time noticed that people were defensive or wary of this project.
Although they may see the value in dealing with the manual challenges of the existing system, speaking to Diop and her team felt imposing and exposing.
She felt this sentiment in her conversations, noting that “people were very scared to speak up or they tried to hide some of their challenges.” In order to circumvent this, Diop tried to get more one-on-one conversations walking around the offices to hear people’s experiences as opposed to collective meetings. Sharing that they “were just doing research” and informing those interviewed that they would be anonymous worked during the exploratory part of the process.
Diop noted that “digitizing feels to people like exposure” and that mindset will prevent people from being transparent on their challenges or shortcomings of the process.
Getting people to open up became a challenge for the entire process.
In addition, the infrastructural challenges faced by the ministries were not top of mind from the very beginning of the project. There was an informal awareness that there were challenges of connectivity across Ministries. However, this challenge was seen as out of the scope of DSTI’s mandate and role as a Department. The need to address infrastructural challenges became more pertinent during the rollout of EPETS-1.
Senior Budget Officer for the Ministry of Agriculture Isha Kamara stated, “…the system is laid out but how can we work without electricity? And on top of that internet? We have had a lot of disruptions of our electricity and seizures of the internet supply. That is our main challenge.” This sentiment echoed throughout the ministries. Although it may have surfaced during the pain point identification phase, the infrastructural hurdles were an impediment the lean DSTI team deemed out of scope.
Discussion Questions
Who would you have spoken to to better understand the problem and how would you have engaged them?
How would you have elicited some of the real opinions of users if you were Diop despite the fears of retribution given the hierarchical and rigid bureaucratic environments?
PART II: Moving into Design
In this part, we discuss the challenges DSTI faced in selecting who to invite to the design table and how to elicit feedback from all users.
The Design Phase:
Creating the platform through design sprints and iterations
To begin the Design phase, the DSTI team created a senior task force composed mainly of Ministry of Finance Senior Budget team members. As the platform evolved, Senior Leaders from other ministries were invited to see a closer-to-finished version of the platform. The discussion around who to and how to engage primarily stopped at the Discovery phase. In the Design phase, these questions felt more foreign.
There was a fear amongst the DSTI team of having ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ and using limited resources to continue to engage a large group of people. This then raised the question of who to cut and what power dynamics were at play in their selection, which in this case was primarily made by the Ministry of Finance.
This taskforce led jointly by the Ministry of Finance and DSTI was charged with approving the design of the EPETS-1 Platform.
The Development Phase
Testing the platform with users
Once the platform was completed, Diop and her team entered the Development phase by rolling out a series of trainings to five pilot ministries. The training was described as “an interactive training workshop designed to improve user knowledge on their role and experience within the system….with an extensive ‘Question and Answer’ session” (EEMS Internal Report).
The training was meant to train but to also collect and incorporate user feedback from various users, such as Ministers, Deputy Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries, Program Managers or Directors, Accountants, and Budget Officers.
The attendees of the training were selected in two steps: The first was a list of stakeholders developed by the Ministry of Finance and DSTI. Given the Ministry of Finance’s knowledge on the expenditure payment system, the Ministry of Finance’s Senior Advisors primarily shaped the list of attendees. Subsequently, the Permanent Secretaries (very senior officials) for each Minister selected representatives from their ministries to attend based on the provided stakeholder list.
It is during those training sessions that the DSTI team uncovered how pressing a challenge the lack of digital infrastructure across ministries would be to this project.
The End User Assessment that Wasn’t:
The challenge to implementing in a broken system
After the training sessions were completed, DSTI conducted an End User Assessment in which they analyzed the preparedness of users across ministries to use EPETS-1. The End User Assessment rolled out simultaneously with the training. The assessment tested three things — 1) access to reliable internet connection with a broadband speed of at least 3 megabits per second, 2) the availability of computers with at least 4gb ram, at least 10gb disk space, and a browser, and 3) scanners that can provide pdf documents. The assessment found that 79% of ministries fulfilled all the above criteria. The remaining ministries that did not meet the threshold were asked to address these gaps immediately in order to ensure they could use EPETS-1 but were not provided the support to do so by DSTI.
Despite a 79% preparedness rating, ministries still complained about basic infrastructure challenges, including electricity shortages, which were not a part of DSTI’s assessment.
Implementation Phase:
Seeking Adaptation Amongst a Flurry of Technical Challenges
After the trainings were completed, Diop’s team entered the Implementation phase where the platform rolled out to all 29 ministries. After launching the platform, DSTI eagerly began to track usage. Out of 469 users, 32% were active platform users by January 2021 (EEMS Internal Report). By 2022, the EPETS-1 project was considered defunct, and the Ministries reverted back to a completely manual process. Let’s explore what may have happened.
Diop and the team believed that they had done a thorough process and stakeholder map from the onset to understand the pain points and challenges across the ministries and across users.
However, it felt like a constant battle to move forward to understand who should be involved in the process, how to reach them, how to get them to the table, and how to ensure their opinions made their way through the process given the existing hierarchical and rigid bureaucratic environments.
There was a sentiment among civil servants that they were not consulted enough, and that the project was not designed for their use. One Senior Leader said, “There was very little consultation…and when I did get to see the platform in the form of a demo I knew it did not work but I did not want to seem as not in favor.” They insisted that if they were not involved much earlier in the process, they would have felt like their opinions could have shaped the platform as opposed to being used as the final stamp. Diop and her team wrestled around the social challenge of how to engage all of the platforms’ potential users and the challenge of who gets to decide who sits at the table. The DSTI team sought to navigate this by using the training sessions as another engagement moment. However, those who got to attend the training felt that this type of engagement was DSTI seeking a rubber stamp of approval on a completed project. One civil servant noted, “When I was engaged on this project, it felt like it was too late to add opinions. It was difficult to see who this was going to serve.”
They came to the training with the mindset that they now must learn a new platform as opposed to it being a space for feedback that still had time to be included in the process.
Throughout the ministries, several were not aware of the existence of this platform before this training. “I found out about this project when I received correspondence from my Minister to attend a training. That was the first I had heard of it”, described an ICT Officer from the Audit Service. Senior leaders were the ones with the opportunity to be involved in the demo presentations.
Those attending the demos were not the Super Users at the bottom of the political hierarchy who needed to use the platform. Those demos also did not include the technical staff that needed to know how to use the platform well to support any of the users, such as the ICT teams.
In this instance, those who were a part of the process were Senior Leaders and the most direct users of the platform. ICT Manager for the Audit Service described it as, “Defacto there is always a steering committee but the step down — the end users — they must be included way before product build and versions.” In this instance, civil servants did not feel like the end users were involved before the final build.
Challenges with who should be trained and who shouldn’t: DSTI could not speak to every possible user but were limited by their knowledge on the subject. They relied on the Ministry of Finance to define who they would contact to join in the demo days and who would join for the trainings. For the trainings, the Permanent Secretaries — Senior Leaders within each Ministry — determined who would be their representatives at these trainings. Senior leaders responsible for hundreds of employees may not have a firm pulse on what is happening on the ground within their organizations. By having senior leaders select who gets to participate, DSTI is subject to their discretion. One example is there were several instances where the individuals who were selected were not actively involved in the budgeting process, but they were the closest to the senior leaders. DSTI could provide input on who would be invited at each stage but did not feel that they could control this engagement. Diop would need to lean on her Supervisors and Senior Leaders at DSTI for support around reaching critical stakeholders overlooked by the Senior Leaders of the ministries.
Chief Operating Officer of DSTI, Ms. Michala Mackay, said the institutional bureaucracy frustrated some of the process. “I cannot write to the ICT Manager directly; it has to come from the Permanent Secretary who would then assign representatives. Although we can say we would like two of your Representatives to be here, we do not have control over the two they send. They may send people but they may send people who may not be the most relevant to the project. Those individuals may write a nice report on the training but then go back to their regular duties”. This poses a grave challenge of barriers to engagement that exists in highly bureaucratic environments where attempts to reach those often excluded are seen as unacceptable.
Less communication leading to more ambiguity: Another observation from Mackay was that the rigid bureaucratic structures did not encourage strong communication channels across teams. Information was not shared nor transmitted within ministries leading to ambiguity. When DSTI sent a letter to the Permanent Secretaries for a follow-up session, it was not guaranteed that the representative who attended the first session would be the same as the second. Mackay noted, “so now you have individuals being trained with no context making it difficult to bring them up-to-speed.” Finally, Diop explained that even if her team requested certain positions to show up, such as an ICT Manager, her team cannot guarantee that this ICT Manager will receive the invitation letter from their ministry nor be requested to attend as one of the team’s representatives. Diop stated, “It could have been determined by the Permanent Secretaries that the ICT team did not need to be present and we only discovered this the day of our training.” Thus, the DSTI team was limited by who showed up to their trainings.
Discussion Questions:
Given the rigid bureaucratic structures and the amount of time and resources you have, how would you have sought to identify and engage users to speak to and join your design process given the rigid bureaucratic and political constraints?
If you were in Diop’s position, at what point of the process would you have addressed the infrastructure issues across Ministries? How would you have addressed it?
Part III: Learnings for DSTI
The Challenges:
Overall, the DSTI team sought to use Human-Centered Design methodology to digitize the Ministry of Finance’s payment processing system. The team hoped by using Human-Centered Design, they could redesign the way the government gets things done by incorporating more voices into the process. Simultaneously, the rigid bureaucratic and resource-constrained setting called into question many challenges that the team was not able to address, such as the ethics of engagement, the social dynamics at play to support large whole-of-government efforts, and the ethics of scope as it relates to what can and cannot be done by one department using public resources.
The challenges Diop and her team faced in applying this methodology showcase the challenges that the DSTI team must plan for and address when embarking on government innovation initiatives within Freetown, Sierra Leone’s national government.
The challenges to uptake and adoption highlight the importance of not utilizing design methodologies as a standalone but also developing a strategic political approach that is unique to rigid bureaucratic environments.
- Design alone won’t work: The uptake challenges experienced highlight the importance of a unified approach to redesigning processes in the public sector: A proper design methodology alone won’t work. It also requires developing a strategic political approach that will allow departments, such as DSTI, to circumvent the rigid bureaucracies to reach users effectively. It requires an ability to negotiate, be strategic, and center the bureaucracy in the design process.
- Reading between the lines in the public sector: The infrastructural challenges highlight the importance of asking nuanced and varied questions to assess infrastructure gaps in resource-constrained environments. In the case of Sierra Leone’s national government, access to reliable internet did not equate to every critical player having access. By one critical person not having access to reliable internet, the whole-of-government approach can fall apart. Similarly, the lack of assessment of electricity shortages created an information gap for which the DSTI could not plan for. Innovators in resource-constrained environments must think holistically about infrastructural design constraints, and must question the ethics of the role they seek to play to address these constraints. They are as much about availability as they are about accessibility.
Moving forward:
As a result of the challenges experienced throughout the launch and implementation of EPETS-1, DSTI has since been focusing its collaborations on: building a more robust stakeholder map, sharing a clear criterion before agreeing to a project that includes implementation and sustainability plans, and working to build a stronger project management protocol amongst its project leads.
To this day, there is great variability in uptake among DSTI’s whole-of-government projects and whole-of-government approaches. Kahil Ali, Head of Project Design within DSTI, noted that the DSTI team needs “political strategists” and hopes to build the soft skills amongst its Developers around strategy, negotiation, and change management. The DSTI team has learned that these soft skills around navigating hierarchical and rigid bureaucratic environments are as critical as tech development skills and that implementation has to be at the forefront of any new project.
The DSTI team’s experience using Human-Centered Design methodologies illuminates how these design tools are not enough to address the challenges of whole-of-government innovation approaches. In rigid bureaucratic environments, these tools must be combined with political strategy and heightened awareness of the challenges nascent to the specific government context to overcome hurdles to engagement. Overall, these lessons will be key to any government innovation lab working in rigid bureaucratic environments and/or resource-constrained environments.
Discussion Questions:
What can other innovation labs learn from DSTI to successfully implement digitally transformative projects?
What questions around local context should innovation labs ask themselves to successfully implement said projects?
