Indonesia – Building State Capability

Working with local governments to improve service delivery in Indonesia

Guest blog written by Karrie McLaughlin

When Indonesia decentralized just over 20 years ago, it did so partly on the promise that bringing services closer to citizens would help to improve them. However, at the same moment that responsibility for the provision of basic public services was shifting to local governments, the nature of those service delivery challenges was itself shifting from improving availability of services to improving access and quality. The logistical tasks of constructing clinic and school buildings and hiring nurses and teachers had largely been completed, and districts are now left looking toward the top of the tree at more difficult problems. This blog examines the MELAYANI – Untangling Problems in Improving Basic Services program to better understand the issues local governments face in dealing with more demanding service delivery challenges, and how they can better be supported in doing so.

Importantly, there is a common element to these more difficult problems—they are complex, context-specific and cannot be solved by one-size-fits-all prescriptions from the central government. The root causes of these problems are multi-faceted and frequently vary from one location to another. As such, they require district governments to play a more active role in identifying, understanding and responding to them.

MELAYANI addressed these challenges by working with local governments to solve service delivery problems of their choice, while testing scalable capacity development approaches and learning about locally-led change. Experiences in the three locations (Bojonegoro, East Java; Kubu Raya, West Kalimantan; and Belu, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT)) are presented in this video.

MELAYANI supported local governments to select the problems that they felt were most important, helping to ensure that they were locally salient. By anchoring analysis in a key issue, rather than a particular sector, it allowed both for more actors to be involved and for the identification and mobilization of new resources. In addition, by providing support to local governments to better understand citizen problems, it provided clearer arguments for policy stability and commitment.

Solving the Wicked Hard Problem of Education Quality in Indonesia

Guest blog written by Rina Arlianti, Stephanie Carter, Murni Hoeng, Siti Ubaidah Idrus, Susanti Sufyadi, Aaron W Watson.

This is a team of six development practitioners working for Indonesia’s Ministry of Education and Culture, the Tanoto Foundation, the Australian supported INOVASI program, and Australian Embassy, Jakarta. They successfully completed the 15-week Practice of PDIA online course that ended in May 2019. This is their story.

The Harvard BSC’s PDIA course has been an exciting journey for all of us. We began the course full of excitement and hope – with most of group members having not met before. We were one of four groups participating from Indonesia, all focused on the issue of education quality. Over the course of 15 weeks, we navigated the twists and turns of the PDIA process, putting key concepts to the test in the field of basic education in Indonesia.

Early on, once we had settled into our group dynamic, we settled on our problem statement:

Learning outcome quality in Indonesian primary schools is still low (low scores in international standardised student tests)

As we progressed, we gained several key insights and takeaways about our problem and the course. Through group discussion and debate, drawing on perspectives from working both within and outside the government system, we settled on the following six key sub-causes for low learning outcome quality in Indonesian primary schools:

Measures of learning are weak (including the use of formative assessment, due to low teacher knowledge)
Teaching/learning process is ineffective (with teachers lacking inadequate skills and knowledge of how to use learning media, to increase student engagement)
Parents are already satisfied with the status quo (there is often low demand for changes to the system, as parents do not know what good teaching looks like)
Lack of learning books for children (due to cumbersome book supply processes at the national level)
Many teachers don’t use digital technology in classrooms (creating missed opportunity for enhanced learning)
Policies that address education quality are not implemented well (and instead focus on physical infrastructure, or if they do exist, are not socialised well in a decentralised system)

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The problem with ‘best practice’: using PDIA to find solutions for Indonesian education

Guest blog by Mark Heyward

Much is made these days of doing development differently, of adaptive programming, and thinking and working politically. Devpolicy Blog featured a series of articles on this topic in September 2018. But do these approaches work?

One program that has embraced adaptive programming is Innovation for Indonesia’s School Children (INOVASI). The program, which began in 2016, is a partnership between the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. It is being implemented by Palladium. INOVASI has adopted the problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) approach to help Indonesian government partners find out what works to improve learning outcomes.

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Tackling the problem of basic education in remote areas of Indonesia

Guest blog written by Annisaa Rachmawati, Agusti Padmanisa, Yossy Rachmatillah, and Senza Arsendy.

This is a team of four development practitioners working for an education program in Indonesia, INOVASI, that aims to find out ‘what works’ (and conversely what does not work) to improve student learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy in basic education. They are a multidisciplinary team of officers working in communications, program implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and operations unit. They successfully completed the 15-week Practice of PDIA online course that ended in May 2019. This is their story.

The term PDIA is something that our team is familiar with, in fact it’s a buzzword we hear everyday at work. Our project uses PDIA as its underlying approach, yet there seems to be different interpretations and debates around how it should be translated into program implementation. Having observed this notion for a while, we decided to enroll in PDIA Online Course to learn rigorously about the approach. We were convinced that this course will equip us with practical knowledge to actually do what we preach in our project.

There are four principles which encompasses PDIA. First, we need to ensure that our intervention is “problem driven” instead of solutions driven. Second, we need to engage relevant stakeholders and create environment which allows for “authorization of positive deviance”. Third, we need to foster experiential learning through “iteration and adaptation”. Last, we “scale through diffusion” successful interventions for reform to be sustainable.

The problem we are trying to tackle is “early grade students in remote areas in Indonesia have difficulties learning to read”, a persisting issue our country has been struggling for decades despite the many efforts collectively put by the government, donor programs, and education practitioners. Policies and best practices (either locally nominated or externally imported) seem to be successful in a short period of time, deceiving us into thinking that we might have solved this problem for good. Not long after specific project or intervention is completed, the same problem reoccurred – leading us right back into capability traps. (Isomorphic mimicry alert!)

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INOVASI’s experience with PDIA to solve the wicked hard problem of basic education in Indonesia

written by Mark Heyward

During the first half of 2018, a group of 21 development practitioners from the Innovation for Indonesia’s School Children (INOVASI) program and partners, formed cross-program groups and completed the intensive, 15-week online course conducted by the Building State Capability program at Harvard’s Centre for International Development, called ‘Practice of PDIA; Building Capability by Delivering Results’. In addition to INOVASI personnel, participants came from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC), the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the DFAT-funded Technical Assistance for System Strengthening (TASS) and Research for Improving Systems of Education (RISE) programs, the Social Monitoring and Early Response Unit (SMERU) Research Institute, and the independent Kuark organization. They worked together in four small groups to address real-world problems related to INOVASI’s aims:

How to improve learning outcomes in Indonesian primary classrooms?
How to systematically improve learning outcomes in Indonesian districts and schools?
How to build an evidence base on what works to improve learning outcomes – to inform policy and practice?

Continue reading INOVASI’s experience with PDIA to solve the wicked hard problem of basic education in Indonesia

PDIA in Indonesia: The new frontline service delivery policy

How does the government of Indonesia make its presence felt by all 250 million citizens across the sprawling archipelago?

While decentralization provides district governments the authority to address local needs, effective execution of these functions relies heavily on the capacity of the local governments to analyze service gaps and drive more coordinated efforts to address them, as well as the capacity of communities to voice their needs, provide feedback and be part of the solution.

To address this, the Medium-Term National Development Plan 2015-19 includes a new policy to improve basic services for the poor and vulnerable. The approach focuses on enhancing interactions at the front line between government, service providers and citizens, as well as their collective ability to diagnose and solve service delivery bottlenecks at the community level.

A multidisciplinary team from 8 sectors conducted a series of field visits between September 2014 and January 2015, with a mission to identify local innovation and best practices for improving services for the poor and vulnerable. Using a PDIA approach, they engaged with a broad set of stakeholders, had enriching interactions, and were able to view the same problem from different angles. Vignettes from their field visits are captured in Catalyzing local innovation to improve services for Indonesia’s Poor. Some of the lessons they learned include:

Focus on fostering experimentation and learning at the local level , rather than fixating on sluggish reforms at the central level.
One size does not fit all. Instead of prescribing a set menu of interventions to improve service delivery, the approach should be to create a supportive policy and institutional environment that fosters innovation.
The locus of innovation also matters. The closer the innovation occurs to the community, the more potential for catalytic change.
Diffusion can happen organically but knowledge sharing and creating communities of practice can help the expansion of innovative ideas.

Watch Anna Winoto from the National Development Planning Ministry in Indonesia discuss the frontline service delivery policy at the Doing Development Differently Philippines workshop. The challenge in this work is to facilitate district governments to innovate, which requires multi-disciplinary district teams who can solve problems together, access flexible financing, leadership and change management, and diagnostic tools to allow for rapid feedback.