Govt of Solomon Islands - Data Platform

Govt. of Solomon Islands (Data Platform)

Role: UX Lead

Background

Solomon Islands consists of nearly 1,000 islands spread over nearly 1.34 million km² of ocean. Its remote and rugged geography and vulnerability to natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes, cyclones, and rising sea levels, presents extreme development challenges for the people of SolomonIslands who live in rural areas (approximately 80% of the population).

In this difficult context, the Solomon Islands Rural Development Program (RDP) is the largest and farthest reaching program of its kind in the country. It has reached over 50% of Solomon Islands’ population and operates in all 9 provinces and 172 wards of the country, from the atoll of Ontong Java to the north, Rennell and Bellona to the south, Anuta and Te Kopia to the East and Shortlands to the west.

The purpose of RDP is two-fold:

1. Community Infrastructure and Services: To improve basic infrastructure and services in rural areas through community-driven development.

2. Agricultural Partnerships: To strengthen the linkages between smallholder farming households and markets through agriculture partnerships and support.

Since it began in 2008, RDP has provided funding and technical support to implement more than 1636 projects, activities, and partnerships impacting more than 337,162 Solomon Islanders in rural communities across the country. The program is designed to ensure the inclusion and participation of all community members, with a specific emphasis on women, youth and people with disabilities. RDP is a government initiative co-funded by the World Bank, Australian Government, European Union, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The Government of Solomon Islands uses a participatory approach from the communities to decide their immediate needs for infrastructure. Planning is focused on real community priorities. This strengthens effective government and promotes coordination at the community level with Provincial and National authorities. The approach recognizes the special conditions in different provinces and islands.

Local community meetings are often held in local churches or schools and the community decides through participatory democracy.

Problems

- Data collection during these meetings happened on paper, involved repetitive data entering for each meeting and validation was too slow - often resulting in poor, inaccurate data on what the needs of the community really were.

- Approval of infrastructure projects were often delayed and suffered from lack of transparency or urgency.

- Once the projects were approved, it was often hard to keep track of their progress, finances, vendor procurements, audits etc.

- The process also suffered from a lack of transparency to the donors of the project and to citizens

- Gathering data for annual reports was a cumbersome process and often there was no way to validate the data, once submitted to the donors.

- The impressive work done by RDP and the Government of Solomon Islands was often not visible to the press or to the donors - thus making future citizen involvement and donor funding that much more difficult.

Approach

Stakeholder workshops in Honiara, Solomon Islands

Developed workflow through collaborative workshops with stakeholders to determine the workflow of approval process. Involved both the government agency - Rural Development Programme and Donor (World Bank). Workshops spanned a week in a beautiful sea-side office in Honiara.

Focus over these workshops were the following:

- Categorization and enumeration of data to be collected for each stage of the community driven project prioritisation.

- User flows for each step of data collection, verification, approval, publishing & report generation

- Determining access levels for each of the user types

- Categorizing and finalizing the output reports based on the Project Development Framework

Field visits for user research

Field visit through often unpaved revealed deep infrastructure constraints and also usability roadblocks:

- Limited internet access (2G) & electricity

- Infrastructure projects located in extremely remote locations

- Data collectors and community had very little exposure to technology

- Issues with infrastructure needed to be tracked on a regular basis to avoid interminable delays

Preliminary iteration of solution

- Online cloud-based low bandwidth Management Information System (MIS)

- Data for Community prioritisation entered on the MIS and local government approvals tracked on the MIS

- Offline compatible low bandwidth Android app that continuously validated data entry

- Waterproof-covered tablets connected to with solar-panel powered battery packs

- Data accessible for output reports through database

User flow documents from the Stakeholder workshops

- Creating a form structure for each infrastructure project

- Reports are the regular status updates on the infrastructure projects

List of forms & data fields for data collection

Site structure for MIS

Business logic for status of an infrastructure project (referred to as subproject)

Data output for reports that need to be submitted to donors

Decoding the results framework and & organizing the data output required

Wireframes & prototypes for usability testing

Field testing prototypes for usability and new problems emerge

Went to nearby islands in canoes and tested our partially functioning prototypes. The platform needed to address the following issues:

- Accountability on the part of reporters submitting data regularly. The reporters were being managed by the Monitoring & Evaluation Officer (M&E officer) - Tricia Sese

- Verifying & publishing data on part of the M&E officer was not easy

- Monitoring reports often did not have photos

- Improved visibility needed with the Ministry and donors

Back to the drawing board for further iterations

Updated Solution

- Easy interface to verify, publish and manage incoming status reports

- Regular email notifications about about Maintenance Reports, Monitoring Reports & Issues summarize status reports and allow the M&E officer to hold the data collectors accountable