Madagascar: Creating a Culture of Results
Introduction to the Leadership Program in Madagascar
Since 2003, soon after the resolution of a prolonged political crisis, the World Bank Institute began collaborating with the Government of Madagascar in the design and delivery of a series of capacity development activities intended to strengthen the capacity of national leadership teams in translating policies, strategies, and reforms into concrete results. The objectives of the first two activities (June 2003 and January 2004)—which took the format of Cabinet retreats—were to strengthen collegial decision making and teamwork, introduce a focus on results, and highlight the importance of capacity development as an integral part of implementing reforms.
In early 2005 a rapid results pilot was launched in the rice sector, intended to increase rice production in a few targeted geographic areas. Experiences from this results-based, practical, and cross-sectoral problem-solving exercise, including concrete results achieved, were then exposed at a later Cabinet retreat in May 2005. The objective of both activities was to strengthen leadership capacity to achieve concrete results by working across sectors with a range of stakeholders and implying decentralized actors.
These activities, which have been integrated with leadership-strengthening activities financed under a World Bank governance project, have contributed to perceived positive change with regarding cooperation and communication among stakeholders, particularly between central and decentralized government; the awareness of roles and responsibilities of implied actors; team spirit; a focus on results; and ability to mobilize actors, all across sectors and from central and decentralized spheres.
June 2003 Cabinet Retreat
Objective
On the request of the President of Madagascar, WBI facilitated a four-day Learning Retreat in Madagascar from June 13 to 16, 2003. The event took place at the former Presidential Palace, Iavoloha, outside of Antananarivo Madagascar.
The main objective of the event was to provide participants with substantive insights into the technical aspects of formulating and executing effective economic management as well as the political economy of achieving successful reforms in social, economic, and political crisis situations. The event provided Malagasy decision- and policy-makers—governmental and nongovernmental—with access to international knowledge, experience and best practice, and also presented participants with the opportunity to closely interact with seasoned policy practitioners and leading thinkers from Asia, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, and North America. The event was designed as the first in a series of proposed learning events for senior decision makers in the country, and as such, provided the foundation for future capacity-building efforts in which the World Bank, collaborating with other development partners, can continue to assist the Government, private sector, and civil society in strengthening institutions, organizations, and individual skills to tackle better the challenges facing the country .
Participants
The June 13 to 15 Government Learning Retreat was attended by about 70 senior officials in Madagascar, including the president, prime minister, vice prime minister, 22 Cabinet ministers, directors-general of ministries, and senior advisers. On June 16, more than 200 parliamentarians from the Senate and National Assembly attended a half-day session focusing on issues of interest to them.
Program
The seminar comprised a blend of theory, case studies, and first-hand experiences, presented by international experts and practitioners through a combination of formal presentations and informal discussions in plenary and parallel working group sessions. The key topic areas in these working groups were good governance, transparency, and anticorruption; public sector reform, public finance, and expenditure management; foreign direct investment; private sector development; and a leadership forum.
Outcome
The retreat was seen as an event that strengthened government teams and created cross-sectoral linkages. Furthermore, the retreat seems to have triggered a firm demand for access to knowledge and information; two subsequent learning retreats have been organized in the country.
January 2004 Cabinet Retreat
Objectives
Building on the June 2003 Cabinet retreat, WBI facilitated a follow-up retreat in the country in January 2004. The focus for the retreat was implementation issues, including improvements in service delivery in the social services sector, and on how to make continuous learning part of the government agenda: to improve performance and achieve development results. The issues were considered in the context of PRSP implementation.
The main objectives for the retreat—as articulated by the president and prime minister—were (a) to reinforce team building in the newly reshuffled cabinet and (b) to accelerate the design and implementation of programs to achieve measurable results in PRSP priority goal areas: private sector development, service delivery, and governance through continuous learning.
Secondary objectives for the retreat—more specifically targeting capacity development—were to enhance capacity at the offices of the prime minister and the vice prime minister to do the following:
- Assess government learning needs
- Assess how to tailor learning content and process to get responses to the objectives set by the different ministries and the offices of the prime minister and the vice prime minister
- Assess how to facilitate change and provide ideas for change
- Engage participatory processes of knowledge sharing with private sector and civil societies
- Assess how to connect and position Madagascar to benefit from global development experiences.
The approach adopted for the retreat was to inspire innovative thinking by injecting targeted global and country-level knowledge and experience. Principles of the process included cross-ministerial priority setting, problem solving, and partnerships. Substantive content provided to achieve this included the following:
· The World Development Report 2004, focusing on service delivery
· Public-private partnerships and the citizen report card experience in Bangalore, India
· EPZs and private sector development in Penang, Malaysia.
Participants
The January 2004 Cabinet retreat was one in a series of learning events organized in Antananarivo, Madagascar, from January 15 to 17, 2004.
Members of academic institutions participated in the January 15 event, while representatives from the private sector and civil society (NGOs) attended the event on January 16. The events on January 15 and 16 took place at the Hilton Hotel in Antananarivo.
The Government Learning Retreat on January 17 brought together 121 senior government officials, including the president, prime minister, vice prime minister, 17 ministers, secretary-generals, and director-generals from all ministries for a one-day event focused on accelerating results for PRSP implementation, instilling a performance culture in government, and building a commitment to continuous learning.
Program
The retreat comprised a blend of formal presentations, question and answer sessions, and working group sessions. Three international practitioners—Margaret Catley-Carlson, ex-Canadian Vice-Minister of Health Sam Paul, the chairman of the Public Affairs Centre in Bangalore, and Dato' Chet Singh, a former civil service representative in Malaysia—joined the retreat, together with Jeff Hammer, a World Bank staffer presenting World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for the Poor. Four specific themes were examined and discussed during the retreat: (a) improving service delivery in a social services sector: education, (b) private sector development, (c) instilling a culture of continuous learning in government, and (d) good governance.
Frannie Léautier, WBI vice president, and the president of the republic presented closing remarks.
Outcome
The output from the retreat included a set of results matrices developed in thematic subgroups and groups, which met to reflect on the ideas presented by resource persons, assess the progress toward PRSP goals, and agree on an action program. The process required identifying and agreeing on three key problems, strategies, and indicators for feasible outcomes in the next 90, 180, and 360 days.
Bringing together all the top-level government officials in Madagascar, including those who had been appointed only days before the retreat, proved particularly successful regarding fostering cross-ministerial relationships. At the end of the day, there was a keen sense of collegiality among the participants across the different ministries.
Evaluations show that a majority of ministers and senior officials believe these learning events to be an important vehicle for improving government effectiveness and for strengthening cross-ministerial relationships and cooperation.
May 2005 Cabinet Retreat
Objectives
Following from previous capacity strengthening activities targeting the leadership of Madagascar, the Government of Madagascar and WBI jointly designed and delivered a third high-level Cabinet retreat in Madagascar from May 6 to 9, 2005. The event took place at the former Presidential Palace, Iavoloha, outside of Antananarivo, Madagascar.
Building on the two previous events, which targeted knowledge sharing and results-based management of reforms, the main objective for this third event was to strengthen leadership capacity to achieve concrete results by working across sectors, with regions, and with the private sector. The event was designed to examine the role of leaders and the use of implementation methods in translating strategy into results (prioritize, mobilize resources, empower actors, and monitor and solve problems along the way) and determine a set of goals in support of selected strategies integral to the growth pillar of the Politique Générale de l’Etat—a national results matrix developed by the government targeting outcomes for each ministry.
In preparation for the event, a rapid results pilot was conducted in three regions, targeting selected activities needed to assure an increase in rice production. In parallel with this initiative, local consultants undertook an analysis of six growth strategies pertaining to Madagascar (fisheries, tourism, handicraft, agrobusiness, mining, and rural electrification), examining the strengths and weaknesses of each sector. The experience and lessons learned from the rapid results initiative and the summary outlines of the analysis were used during the retreat as the basis for the selection of short-term (100 to 150 days) outcomes and to articulate action plans with benchmarks, contributing partners, and accountabilities.
Participants
The May 5 to 6 Government Learning Retreat was attended by more than 50 senior government officials in Madagascar, including the prime minister, ministers, secretary-generals, chefs de regions, and a number of Malagasy ambassadors from around the world. The president made an appearance during the retreat and invited conference participants to accompany him on a tour of the newly developed rice field at Iavoloha, a showcase example of a flourishing, fully irrigated rice field.
As with the previous two retreats, a third day (May 9) was built into the program for more than 100 governmental and nongovernmental actors, consisting primarily of private sector representatives and donor project management units. The objective was to facilitate partnerships between public and private actors in the actual delivery of results.
Program
The retreat comprised a blend of formal presentations, question and answer sessions, and working group sessions. A group of international rice experts delivered a presentation on pricing and market regulation in the rice sector. Warrick Smith, director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2005 team presented selected findings from this report on how certain policy reforms can remove the constraints to growth. Manuel Hinds, former minister of finance in El Salvador, presented a practitioner’s view on prioritizing and mobilizing around selected reforms in spite of pressures to do everything at once.
The preliminary results from the rapid results initiative in the rice sector were presented, highlighting operational and institutional constraints specific to the three regions targeted by this project. U.S. consultant Nadim Matta introduced participants to the rapid results methodology and demonstrated how this implementation technique could be applied to Madagascar, after which the participants, having formed cross-sectoral working groups, articulated detailed action plans and concrete results to be achieved in the growth strategies examined.
Outcome
The work and discussions during the retreat contributed to heightened awareness among participants to the broad partnership needed between the public and private sector to achieve results, emphasizing the importance of implicating decision makers and practitioners from the regions and communes.
The output from the retreat was outlining of detailed action plans for every growth sector identified and a firm commitment from the prime minister to give high priority to actions leading to these results, including the monitoring of progress and an immediate response to institutional constraints to ensure achievement of the identified outcomes.
Evaluations show that a majority of participants judged the impact of the retreat to be very important in terms of improving individual capacity in the area of results-based management and in developing the results framework in support of the country’s vision. Another important impact was seen to be on improved dialogue between private sector and government.