INTEGRATING PUBLIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE REGISTRIES IN

THE EVALUATION OF SOCIAL PROGRAMS

Boraine, H., Nhlapo-Hlope, J., De Klerk, S., Lentsoane, L., Musekene, E., and Ruch, W.

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

A. Background

B. South Africa’s social wage regime since 1994

C. National Integrated Social Information System

D. SOCPEN

E. Other information systems supporting social wage regime: education, healthcare, basic services, public employment programmes, human settlements

F. Obstacles to integration

G. Conclusion

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BACKGROUND

• Democratic state inherited a divided nation, withhigh poverty levels, inequalities, discriminatorypractices and inequitable distribution of income.

• There has been significant progress since 1994BUT South Africa still faces:

• official unemployment rate of 25.5%

• high poverty levels: estimated 20.2% of thepopulation lived below the food poverty line.

• high and growing inequality:

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BACKGROUND continued

Poverty Headcounts 2006 2009 2011

Percentage of the population that is poor (below the UBPL)

57.2% 56.8% 45.5%

Number of poor persons (millions) 27.1 27.8 23.0

Percentage of the population living in extreme poverty (below the FPL)

26.6% 32.4% 20.2%

Number of extremely poor persons (millions)

12.6 15.8 10.24

BACKGROUND: MONITORING AND THE EVALUATION SYSTEM• National Monitoring and Evaluation Framework of Outcomes: Introduced

2009

• Current development priorities derived from the Constitution and furtherarticulated in the NDP 2012: Vision of Equity and prosperity by 2030

• Defines 14 outcomes: Quality basic education, skills development andhealthcare; Reducing crime and corruption; Jobs and inclusive growth; Economicinfrastructure; Rural development ands spatial equity; Sustainable humansettlements; Local government; Sustainable development- the environmental leg;Better Africa and better world; Competent Public service; Social protection; nationbuilding and social cohesion

• Performance agreements for ministers and signed with the president

• Civil servants assisting include: Content and data specialists and variousforums established including data forums, implementation forums toencourage coordination IMCs and War on Poverty coordinated by theDeputy President

• Public involved

– Citizen based monitoring

– Public POA 5

Links to

out-come web-sites

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BACKGROUND cont: THE EVALUATION SYSTEM

• National Evaluation Policy Framework: by Cabinet in 2011

• Derives mandate from Constitution: The Constitution (section 195)

mandates that in the principles of public administration; the PFMA; MFMA:

• Defines evaluation as: The systematic collection and objective analysis of

evidence on public policies, programmes, projects, functions and organisations toassess issues such as relevance, performance (effectiveness and efficiency), valuefor money, impact and sustainability and recommend ways forward.

• Some Evaluation done: ECD, 2012/13 Nutrition for children under 5 years,

impact evaluation of evaluation of grade R outcomes, comprehensive ruraldevelopment programme, evaluation of the urban settlements development grant,implementation evaluation of the restitution programme, 2014 plan evaluationsincludes EPWP, impact evaluation of the Funza Lushaka bursary scheme, impactevaluation of the national schools nutrition programme

• Source of data: Official survey done by STATSSA; NIDS; other surveys done by

private and public entities, not yet mined other systems due to unscientificness ofthe data.

• Evaluations plan 2014/2019 recently approved by cabinet 7

THE CONSTITUTIONAL MANDATE ON SOUTH AFRICA’S SOCIAL WAGE

Constitutional mandate Social wage Who must deliver

Section 27: Social security State Old Age Pension; Child Support Grant;

Disability Grant; Foster Care Grant;

Veterans Grant; Care Dependency Grant

Section 27: Clean water 6kl per household per month Local government

Section 50kwh per household per month Local government

Section 26: right to housing Reconstruction and Development

Programme (RDP)house

Department of Housing:

Province municipalities

Section 29: Right to education No fee School Department of Basic

Education: Province

Section 27: Right to Health Care Free health care for under 6 and pregnant

women and later NHI

Department of Health :

Province

Social Insurance Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) and

Compensation for Occupational Injuries and

Diseases (COIDA)

Department of Labour

Public employment programmes Expanded Public work Programme and

Community Work Programme

All three spheres of

government8

GOVERNMENT SPEND ON THE SOCIAL WAGE

• Out of a total population of 52million about 16 million peoplereceive social assistance

• Government spends aboutUS$100 per month per householdon the poorest 40% ofhouseholds on the social wage,including social grants

• 60% of government spendingallocated to the social wage

• 19% of GDP is spent on the socialassistance).

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THE CASE FOR TRACKING ACCESS/COVERAGE and THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT ON THE SOCIAL WAGE

• Despite this huge investment, poverty persists. Panel study show that 40% of thepoor in 2008 remained poor in 2013; those that did not, their status improvedbecause of employment and grants. Those that became poorer; non health, jobloss

– Employment has become skills bias: High skilled employment rose by 50%.Low skilled employment fell by 20%. This could largely be because increasedtrade has enabled the adoption of unskilled labour saving technology (Wood,et al., 1994); government policies and investment subsidies between 1993-97exacerbated an already capital intensive production structure and sectors thatmopped up unskilled labour either declined or adopted more capital intensivemethodology sectors that come immediately in mind include agriculture andmining. (Rodrik, 2006 p. 12) hence the importance of education

– Poverty rate: without social grants = 0.43. With social grants =0.25

– Health care including access to basic services

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NATIONAL INTEGRATED SOCIAL INFORMATION SYSTEM (NISIS)

• Approved by Cabinet in 2008• Funded by the National Department of Social

Development by 50% of the funding. The other halfcomes from Rural Development and Land Reformwhich is responsible for the War on Poverty andthe Comprehensive Rural Development Programme

• Targeting all households in the poorest wards butnot systematic and Results collated by CommunityDevelopment Workers are fed into a referralsystem.

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NATIONAL INTEGRATED SOCIAL INFORMATION SYSTEM (NISIS) Continued

• NISIS was developed to:

• provide a database of households living in poverty to enable service deliverymonitoring, a service referrals system and poverty analysis.

• establish a platform to enable the coordination and integration of socialprotection initiatives by

• To provide reliable, integrated and detailed view of households living inpoverty;

• Enable the coordination of anti-poverty efforts across the spheres ofgovernment;

• To minimise duplication and inefficiencies from the maintenance of amultitude of deficient beneficiary registers and registration processes;

• To enhance policy development and monitoring and evaluationcapabilities by providing tools and data for evidence based analysis anddecision making;

• To reduce fraud by providing visibility of individuals’ participation acrossmajor social programmes.

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NISIS FIELDS RECORDED

• Personal details: address, name, gender, age, marital status, ID, ID type, disability type, level of education, school attendance, walking to school, distance to school

• Individual: Skills, employment status, participation in sport and other community activities

• Government service needs assessment: Educational services, Health services, Social grant applications, Home Affairs (birth, marriage, death registration),Small business development, Labour services

• Per household: Access to land, water and markets for the production of live stock, Land ownership and utilisation, Food consumption and source of food, Household involvement in small business (type), Access to basic services (water, sanitation, electricity, refuse removal), Access to free basic services (water, sanitation, electricity, refuse removal), Household income, Dwelling type

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CHALLENGES WITH NISIS

• Snails pace: Since profiling ofhouseholds started in 2009, 1 013488 poor households out ofestimated 4.75 million poorhouseholds had been profiledand captured on the system inOctober 2014, At this rate it willtake 12 to 16 years to completethe profiling of poor households(i.e. households living below thepoverty line)

• Ownership is important: Building a database of poor households is a resource intensive exercise, requiring sustainable long term funding and support of key players such as National Treasury.

• Data systems must be utilised and utilisable if to be sustainable but– there is poor quality control (garbage

in)

– all the social wage departments and systems linking and meeting demand. So all that NISIS has done is to generate a massive needs list

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SOCPENBiggest payment system in SouthAfrica; by Department of SocialDevelopment and South Africa SocialSecurity Agency

SOCPEN interfaces with othergovernment information systemsmore importantly Department ofHome Affairs and can provide real-time information from the populationregister and PERSAL, to cross-checkincome data.

Biometric systems are in place forbeneficiaries to collect their moneyand prove their identity, includingfingerprints and voice recognition.

Legacy information managementsystem running a comprehensivesystem of social assistance grants andprocesses more than 16 368 403grants monthly 15

SOCPEN PROCESS

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SOCIAL GRANT LIFECYCLE

1.Application on demand-SASSA

office

2. Screening of applications

3.Processing of

applications within 21 days

4.Approve/reject

application

5.Applicants informed on

outcomes6.Enrol applicants into

the scheme

7.SOCPEN’s payroll produces

payment schedule aggregated by provinces

and payment service providers

CHALLENGES(SOCPEN)

Limits include: • Reaching its ability to be customised and being overtaken

by many technological changes • Processes producing substantial volume of paper and

forms• Not being an organisation-wide system covering all SASSA

operations• Maintain other operational MISs which is inefficient and

leads to duplication of data storing (making reporting, monitoring and evaluation difficult)

• Linking with other MISs but not always in real time• Not being set up to integrate data and information

management, which means its overall focus is on managing operational processes for grant delivery rather than on policy coordination and oversight.

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LESSONS LEARNT (SOCPEN)

• Old is gold. Even though it is a legacy system built on a non-graphical user interface based on mainframes, SOCPEN has delivered relatively well.

• SITA plays a pivotal role in supporting and maintaining SOCPEN.

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OTHER INFORMATION SYSTEMS SUPPORTING SOCIAL PROTECTION

• Education: Learner Unit Record Information and Tracking System(LURITS)- 2008– Unit record data for each learner. Appr. 12 million records per

academic year. – The data includes ID number, date of birth, gender, address,

telephone number, parents (alive or deceased), province of origin, grade, whether receiving state funding for grade R, class, school attendance last year, whether receiving a social grant, whether boards at hostel or at home, whether benefits from school feeding scheme, special school or mainstream school, disabilities, language (home, teaching preferred), languages taken as subjects, matriculation subjects (for grades 10-12), and extramural activities.

– Each learner has a unique identifier (LURITS number)– Quality of data, LURITS number not sticky

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OTHER INFORMATION SYSTEMS: HEALTHCARE AND HOUSING

• Healthcare: fragmented information system, lacksinteroperability between the 42 heterogeneous HealthInformation systems

• Housing:• National Housing Needs Register launched in 2009; web based

system to enable provinces and municipalities to registerhousing needs.

• Housing Subsidy System:• Tracks subsidies given and records the progress of subsidy allocations made.• Managed at national level by the Department of Human Settlements and by

provinces,• Allows users to register, edit and verify applications• Capacity at national level to support municipalities inadequate. Users at

municipality level find it difficult to pull out information as and when theyneed it.

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OTHER INFORMATION SYSTEMS: PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT

• Unemployment structural• Participant Manager’s application that can run on mobile phones to manage

attendance for thousands of people on a daily basis that are based at multiplelocations. The app is available as native Android or iPhone apps. It is built onHTML 5.• Functionality: registers new participants onto the programme; uploads identification

documents, bank account details and a participant photo and uses a server-side facialrecognition API to compare recorded images against reference images. It tracks time andattendance for a group of participants and relays to the Payments App to enableparticipant payment using Biometric verification and Client side facial detection. Thesame system is used by the manager to allocate tools and other resources to aparticipant and has offline data storage capability and immediately synchronises withthe server when internet becomes available.

• Payments app is accessible via a user interface (from within the ParticipantManagement app) or a comprehensive REST API. It is built using Java, ApacheTomcat container, Spring Security implementation, ZKOSS RIA for userinterface and MySQL for the database.• Functionality: It is used to manage $9 million in wage payments each month for about

170,000 participants. It uses the attendance and wage rate data received fromParticipant Management app to calculate the payroll for workgroup. All payment issubmitted via the gateway directly to the banking system and a full reconciliation is doneon payments submitted, per transaction with the bank account.

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OTHER INFORMATION SYSTEMS: INDIGENT REGISTERS

Indigent registers – municipalities - free basic services.

• Definitions of “indigent” vary across municipality

• Criteria used to determine indigent households vary from municipality to municipality. Most use income as a broad measure

• Maintenance problematic: some municipalities update them monthly, others quarterly and some only annually.

• Reliability and quality of the data remains suspect for monitoring and reporting purposes.

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STATE OF NATIONAL INTEGRATED SOCIAL INFORMATION SYSTEM

– Information generated by NISIS should enable government to act locally and respond to needs at the household an community level; aggregated information allows government to act strategically by tracking progress and by prioritising resource allocations where needed most.

– Currently, no single national database integrating the different elements of the social wage, namely: social assistance, primary healthcare, housing, free basic services, no fee schools and school feeding programmes, unemployment insurance and public employment programmes.

– BUT …

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EXAMPLES OF DATA INTEGRATIONLocal level: City of Johannesburg’s Expanded Social Package

Siyasizana

• Registration system is established as the single window for socialassistance as the single access point to all City of Johannesburgservices provided to poor and vulnerable populations.

• Examples of Success– The link with SOCPEN enabled the CoJ to automatically target social grant

recipients through an SMS campaign and expand coverage rapidly by anadditional 150 000 beneficiaries.

– Comparisons against COJ’s Housing waiting list identified 4,773 (9.6%)applicants earning above threshold, 968 of which earned over R10,000 amonth

– The ESP has allowed the CoJ to multiply its coverage of FBS beneficiariesseveral fold .

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EXAMPLES OF DATA INTEGRATION: cont• Provincial level: KwaZulu-Natal ‘s integrated service

delivery model Operation Sukuma Sakhe, – database is sourced through a manual collation of information (data)

from households by Community Care Givers (CCGs). A summary report with the identified needs is used for referrals to government departments.

• Examples of Success– There is a clear structure of information flow from the community

caregivers to a “War Room”, local, district and provincial task teams and government departments which enables reporting and escalation of issues and feedback to the households.

– model’s integration is that it provides a comprehensive and packaged solution to the basket of needs

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INTEGRATION OF SYSTEMS

• Basic level: systems designed in such to allow data collected by one system to be integrated with data from another system.

• Advanced level: IT systems and their databases designed to ensure a change in one system automatically cascades the change to the related system.

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OBSTACLES TO INTEGRATION

• Sustained political will in the face of competing priorities. Benefits of integration not evident to decision-makers

• Tendency to emphasise data collection rather than utilisation

• Access to data and lack of metadata, difficulty to establish MOU’s for data flow

• Quality of data in administrative systems

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OBSTACLES TO INTEGRATION (CONTINUED)

• Legacy administrative systems

• Systems not designed for integration and analysis as objectives

• Technical Capacity

• Privacy issues

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CONCLUSION

• Limited integration of registers

• We have systems with rich data, all potential candidates for integration.

• These systems are variable in quality and completeness, so some work would be needed to prepare the individual systems to realise the benefits of such an exercise.

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OBRIGADOTHANK YOU

ENKOSIDANKIE

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