Overview
The Service Delivery Indicators initiative is an Africa-wide program that collects facility-based data from schools and health facilities. By adopting the perspectives of the citizens accessing the services, the indicators act as a service delivery report card on education and health care. The overall objective of the indicators is to gauge the quality of service delivery in primary education and basic health services. In so doing, the indicators enable governments and citizens to identify gaps and track progress within and across countries over time. The goal is to increase accountability for improved quality of services toward the ultimate end of improving human development outcomes.
The SDI initiative is a partnership of the World Bank, the African Economic Research Consortium and the African Development Bank to develop and institutionalize a set of robust measures of service delivery. The measurement of these indicators is based on survey instruments underpinned by rigorous research and embraces the latest innovations in measuring provider competence and effort. The survey instruments were piloted in Tanzania and Senegal. Uganda is the second country where a full-fledged SDI has been implemented, following Kenya which was completed in July 2013.
The Uganda SDI surveys were implemented by the Economic Policy and Research Centre (EPRC). Before implementation, there was an extensive consultation process involving key stakeholders in education and health (technical officers in ministries, and non-governmental organizations) in Uganda to contextualize the SDI instruments and discuss the survey design. Data collection in the field took place between June and August 2013, with simultaneous data entry.
Objectives
- Deliver learning outcomes policy-makers and citizens care about
- Construct a set of benchmarking metrics that capture critical dimensions of service delivery
- Provide a means to track service delivery performance in education and health across Sub-Saharan Africa and over time.
Funding
The major funders of the SDI initiative are The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the World Bank.
