Don Quixote series

Leapfrogging had become last year’s buzzword, one of those mantras senior leadership rode passionately to frame the future. The main idea behind the concept of leapfrogging is that small and incremental innovations help us to stay ahead. However, sometimes, radical innovations will permit the “frog” to progress faster without experiencing intermediary stages in its journey forward. One easily relatable example for this would be moving from saving and storing money under your mattress to using a digital cash application on your phone instead, without passing through the hassles of having to fill a deposit slip at the bank downtown.

With an ambitious timeline in the Philippines, we envisioned local governments units (LGUs) leapfrogging to the 21st century by harnessing the transformative power of new technologies to deliver essential services in a completely new way (to be read in one breath and a crescendo voice please). Unfortunately, the truth is that the vast majority of LGUs in the Philippines are trapped in archaic, inefficient, non-transparent, paper-based, and overly bureaucratic systems that often lead to poor quality service delivery with accountability risks.

Our leapfrog ambition was as follows:

1. to redesign business processes for essential services to make them future-ready, user-centered, more efficient, and less prone to corruption;
2. to solicit with a seed of e-governance innovative LGU prototypes, data, and evidence to unlock national resources for better formulation of integrated investment plans; and
3. to ignite a nation-wide digital transformation program.

To do so, we would have worked toward digital product development, creating a fresh data eco-system for targeted LGUs and ignite the start of a journey in a national conference on digital transformation for the purpose of agenda 2030.

Well, while global trends did show potential to use digital technologies and insights from data analysis to inform, improve, and institutionalize reforms in local public service delivery; the country faces multiple constrains in coming up with solutions that could be responsive and really inclusive. Philippines has a large opportunity to expand the use and adoption of digital technologies, data collection and analysis to improve service delivery outcomes toward achievement of national and global development goals, but the reality is that the country is at risk of falling behind its southeast Asian neighbors unless it invests heavily in the diffusion of technologies at the local level to enable more responsive, participatory, and efficient service delivery at least of the basics to start with.

What tapped-in so far the frog’s leap is certainly not the merit of the vision or sense of direction toward an e-future in local governance aspiring to be more responsive and community-centric. UNDP will remain committed to tow in that direction, whatever it takes. Instead, what halted the jump is the realization of how important leadership preparedness to innovation is and how the same is not always equally distributed in the public administration. Information and communications technology is, in fact, a luxury in many LGUs. There are those whose way of doing business may be well stacked in the tip-tap of vintage Olivetti type of keyboards. Going online with public services requires a digital space to be inhabited by users without exposing them to a new set of vulnerabilities. Data architecture needs to be systemically designed since inception. More importantly, the surge toward a giant leap can be grounded by the undeniable mind gap of users both within and outside the public administration. People prefer to see the paper version of their civil right rather than a text on their Samsung phone. More some last mile potential users could be left out from the comfortable shade of the “cloud” of e-governance. Rushing too fast in a technology uplift without a necessary complement of an in depth understanding, experience and response to social and cultural dynamics may increase the divide of a new group of tech savvy and those that — unless given a chance to walk through a “natural” albeit accelerated evolution — may well feel alienated by the “bit and byte” of e-governance.

Then the question that comes to my mind is for all of us story tellers in the development pond: shouldn’t we tone down just a bit our excitement for a magic kiss of the fairy tale princess and carefully pace our acceleration into the future with a thoughtful selection of intermediary evolutionary steps and technologies worth experiencing at the right speed for a collective and really inclusive maturation? Ernst Friedrich Schumacher in his Small is Beautiful, a study of economics as if people mattered, would call them “decentralized and appropriate technologies”.

It’s a bit the same question I had in mind during my first grade when I found myself always at the front of our single file in school. My tallest classmates grew at the speed of light that year but their mindset wasn’t so different from mine, trapped in a body surely future-proof yet scared of the darkness just like most of us below 109 cm. or so.