Benefits and Costs of Strategic Planning
The subject of leadership, leading and being led is normally an interesting one and one of the critical elements in leading for most public and non profit entities has to do with strategic planning. How can one discuss strategic planning in a context where civil registration and vital statistics systems are limping? There are several African countries that are however "breaking with broken systems" and I am happy Uganda is one of them. Post-mortemly, let me attempt to discuss the cost and benefit of strategic planning based on an experiences and lessons from countries in Africa who gathered in Kampala between 1 - 6 of September 2013 and talked civil registration and vital statistics:
A senior member of the European Parliamnet recently correctly remarked that “for many living in the developed world, it is unthinkable for the birth of a child to go unregistered” and this is because these countries have functional birth and death registration systems and secondly because of the value placed on registering births such as recognition and protection of children’s first right – the right to identity and existence as stipulated in the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) that came into existence in 1990. In the case of Uganda, while birth registration is compulsory for all, by 2006, only 21% of births had been registered. Causes attributed to this scenario as discussed in workshop or seen during field visit monitoring have been costs associated with birth registration, discouraging distance people have to walk to the sub county and district authorities to register and the general lack of awareness on the need to register. Initially Uganda Registration Services Bureau, an entity mandated by law to carry out civil registration in Uganda, with support from partners like UNICEF printed certificates and supplied local governments with these items to reduce cost and distance. Several local governments were financially assisted to carry out social mobilisation to increase awareness on the need to register birth. Birth registration increased from 21 percent to 30 percent in 2011.
Given the above scenario, some thing radical must happen, a strategic intervention requirng strategic thought and plan is required. With strategic leadership from URSB, credible evidence such as the Uganda Demographic Health Survey (UDHS 2011) among others were reviewed, which indicated that more than 56 percent Uganda’s births are happening in the hospitals of Uganda; secondly, other factors considered by government included the wide spread availability and use of mobile phones in Uganda and with this in mind, URSB developed a strategic plan that saw it work with software developers to come up with what is now being referred to as the mobile vital records system that uses both web based and mobile phone applications to register births at the community level and hospitals in real time and mothers get to receive birth certificates for their children in real time too.
Considering Bryson's (2011) definition of “strategic planning as a deliberate, disciplined approach to producing fundamental decisions and action that shape and guide what an organisation… is, what is does, and why” (pp.8), it is extremely applicable in this case. What can be the gain here is “effectiveness, responsiveness” of the work and the benefit directly impacting the people of Uganda. The cost of having not planned this way before has been in terms of time lost and the amount of money spent vis-à-vis the return on investment – a movement from 21 percent to 30 percent between 2006 and 2011. Roll out of the mobile vital records system would certainly give a biger milage or coverage of birth registration.
Reference
Bryson, J. M. (2011). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement (4th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
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