Opinion: 7 ways to strengthen your delivery unit

Deliverology — or the Science of Delivery — has been popular since the U.K. Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit came into being in 2001 under the Blair administration. Established as the engine rooms of policy implementation, delivery units are usually center of government institutions that monitor progress and strengthen ministries, departments and agencies’ capacity to deliver key policy priorities. Since the turn of the century, delivery units have risen to prominence and become mainstays in many administrations around the world, helping governments move from policy to implementation and realize their ambitious election promises. Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa have all emulated the delivery unit model. Recently, however, donors have looked to delivery units to expedite the realization of tangible development results in low and lower middle income countries. Experience reveals seven key success factors — distilled from lessons learned in Pakistan, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone — for delivery units operating in contexts with very low public sector capability, where ministries, departments and agencies are struggling or unable to implement policy. The main takeaways? Delivery units need to work with existing institutions (both formal and informal), address skills gaps — rather than working around them — and collect and use better data to drive results. 1. The delivery team should work to ensure that the intervention has the correct level of authority and acceptance from the key decision-makers within government. During the program’s design phase, the team should push for the unit lead counterpart (the premier or otherwise) to chair any forums during the lifespan of the delivery unit. The delivery team should push for a verbal brief in advance of each meeting to ensure a shared understanding and a common objective is established. 2. The unit should take time to understand existing and historic systems, and think carefully before creating new ones, especially if they are temporary. It is imperative to understand the successes and failures of previous programs with similar aims. The delivery team should think carefully before creating parallel systems and look for entry points to build on existing structures and ensure that the program is working with the grain rather than attempting to tackle pervasive problems head on. 3. The unit should have a coherent set of priorities that are focused, achievable and funded and that support existing ministerial objectives. Priorities should be developed with meaningful input from all implementing actors: government, citizens, donors and nongovernmental organizations. In addition, before any intervention takes place a political economy analysis of potential priority areas should be undertaken (in particular to understand who benefits from the status quo). This means that frank conversations have been held to understand whether there is the genuine will to expend political capital on achieving a priority. 4. The delivery team should make clear which skills gaps the program intends to address, and the relative focus on this compared to other aspects of the program. During the design phase, the program should conduct a baseline capacity assessment with relevant government ministries and/or agencies and clearly articulate the skills gap that the program intends to address. The delivery unit should ensure a clear agreement on the focus on capacity building compared to other aspects of the program. 5. The intervention should proactively work to align people’s incentives with achieving the program priorities. The program design should ensure that those who are held to account are those with the relevant responsibility and authority to effect change. For government ministry staff, this will likely be in large part about developing functional institutions where performance and reward are linked. 6. The delivery team must develop an efficient but robust way of measuring whether the intervention is on track, and ensure those holding the program to account use this. In many low capacity contexts, data is not comprehensively collected, cleaned or operationalized, compounding the struggle to deliver. Good data is the lifeblood of any delivery unit as performance against roadmaps needs to be constantly tracked and assessed. In any performance assessment, the program must recognize the need to look both backward and forward, for clear prioritization of activities, and for sound judgement on both the intervention and program management levels. The delivery team should present this in a clear and coherent way to the relevant authorities in order to enable them to hold the program to account, and intervene where needed. 7. The program design should institutionalize routines such as forums, working groups, and regular activity reporting. The delivery team should aim to hold the people to account against agreed plans. Regular more technical meetings in which all the relevant people (inside and outside of public institutions) are important to discuss progress and agree on the necessary next steps to drive it further. Donor agencies and their development partners have relied heavily on proven techniques that have worked in previous delivery units, yet these approaches lack the nuances required for low public sector capability contexts. On the other end of the spectrum, some sceptics have gone so far to say that countries with low public sector capability are “not ready for delivery units” due to their lack of public sector capacity or state fragility; the discourse on South Sudan’s state capability is a prime example here. Clear from these seven key success factors is their acknowledgment of the context in which a delivery unit is located and a focus on increasing the capability of structures and individuals within the public sector. By doing so the delivery unit program is not only aiding in the delivery of immediate policy, it is building sustainable structures capable of converting rhetoric into reality. Join the Devex community and access more in-depth analysis, breaking news and business advice — and a host of other services — on international development, humanitarian aid and global health.