Public capacities for an effective development

For example, in 2001 Colombia launched an information technology inclusion program in the schools, called "Computadores para educar" (Computers to educate). The plan consisted of collecting used computers, updating them, and taking them to the schools to be used by teachers and students. The objective was to improve the student's language skills. Between 2000 and 2014, the Colombian government distributed close to 780 thousand computers in 41 thousand educational establishments for almost 8 million children and youths. At the time of its launching, "Computadores para educar", which is still in place, was not an isolated program. Many developing countries, especially in Latin America, were implementing similar policies seeking to reduce the technological gap, train teachers in new technologies, update study methodologies, and consenquently, improve learning skills. 

However, "Computers to educate did not achieve its objective. Studies showed that Colombian students had not significantly improved their grades in language, mostly because the language teachers did not use the computers to teach despite the fact that they had been trained. There were more modern available computers, with access to Internet, but the type of teaching was not modified. Conclusion: student learning did not improve as expected. 

This is not an isolated case where a public program did not achieve the expected results. However, this and other problems in the provision of public goods and services could be solved improving the capacities of the States. 

But what is the capacity of the State? The concept is linked to those factors that affect the possibilities of public entities to design public policies and implement them in and effective and efficient manner, and generate learning throughout these processes. 

What are these factors? The Reporte de Economía y Desarrollo 2015 (RED) (Economy and Development Report), developed by CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, mentions four: the quality of the bureaucracy, the purchasing system, citizen participation, and the monitoring and evaluation processes of public policies. 

With respect to the bureaucracy, it is essential to provide good salaries to public officials to encourage their effort. This is done through the flexibility of the salary structure, with the objective of linking the salary and the development of the career to the competencies and effort of the worker, in order to attract the best bureaucrats and encourage a better performance. 

In second place, it is necessary to combine control and transparency to make good purchases. When combining monitoring and supervision with greater transparency, appropriate incentives are generated to make public purchasing more efficient. 

Third, promoting citizen participation is key to improve the effectiveness of accountability. It is important to achieve a more direct and frequent relation between citizens and the bureaucracy in charge of the provision of public goods and services. 

Finally, managing knowledge and generating leanring enables a better management. The management of public policies is a permanent source of experiences that transforms into knowledge and learning for policy makers. 

In Latin America, different initiatives have emerged to measure the performance of the States in the different stages of the public policy cycle. With respect to the evaluation of programs, several countries already have an institution in charge of monitoring and evaluating governmental activity, and have a legal framework that demands the development of evaluations, establishes technical standards, incorporates quality and pertinent statistical information systems to evaluate the projects, and requires the publication of the results of the evaluations. In addition, mechanisms are being developed to generate institutional learning from the evaluations. An example of this type of agency is that of Colombia, which has the Sistema Nacional de Evaluación de Gestión y Resultados (SINERGIA) (National System for the Evaluation of Management and Results).

There is no one single recipe to achieve an effective State, and it cannot be expected that a Government will be infallible. What is important is to establish the basis for a smooth operation of the State structure, always open to learn from mistakes.