Despite the advantages for governments and citizens of the integration of public policy registries, countries must first overcome political, budgetary, technical and ethical difficulties
Kathy Lindert, from the World Bank, Luís Henrique Paiva, from IPC-IG, and Valentina Barca, from Oxford
Brasilia, 5 April 2016 – For those countries that seek to design effective social protection programs that meet the needs of the population in an effective manner, databases integration will be “the challenge for the next 10 years,” according to Kathy Lindert, World Bank Chief Economist for Social Protection and Employment, during discussions with managers and experts from Brazil and abroad in the International Seminar on Database and Information Systems Integration for Public Policy Improvement, held on 5 and 6 April in Brasilia, organized by the National Citizen Income Network Secretariat (SENARC) of the Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Poverty (MDS) in partnership with the Brazil Learning Initiative for a World without Poverty (WWP).
While acknowledging Brazil’s success since 2001 in building the Unified Registry for Social Programs, Kathy said that Brazil´s highest priority was to achieve interoperability with the country´s other public records systems. This has been successfully done in countries such as Australia, Chile and Argentina. The term “interoperability” means independent entities of a same government communicating and working in synergy to share data for use in decision-making.
Such integration can benefit public policy makers, local agencies and citizens, given that it enables them to have a clearer view of the needs of social programs beneficiaries. Integration also eliminates data systems duplication and lightens the bureaucratic burden on citizens who are required to provide identical personal information for different official bodies.
See more details of the presentation by Kathy Lindert
For Valentina Barca, a consultant from Oxford Policy Management, the onus for failing to implement integrated registries is frequently placed on technical difficulties, whereas in reality the situation calls for mainstreaming political and institutional arrangements.
Valentina, who has studied data integration scenarios of over 40 countries, went on to say that “the ultimate goal is always to share information, make decisions and improve people´s standard of living. Therefore you have to accept that the process is slow and that mistakes will be made and subsequently adjusted”.
She added that even the best and most comprehensive of systems is not good enough unless the data can be converted into information that will be useful for designing public policies, and that “those countries that went through this process recently placed great emphasis on the data and how it could be usefully employed”. Finally, Valentina pointed to the crucial need to establish priorities rather than expecting all the data to flow in at once.
Read the analysis of the Italian consultant Valentina Barca
Challenges
Discussions on successful integration experiences, one of the seminar´s objectives, revealed that costs are significant barriers to different public institutions sharing responsibilities.
Referring to the difficulties encountered by many countries to integrate, maintain and expand data systems, Kathy Lindert raised an important question: “In Brazil the MDS is paying for the Unified Registry, but many others use it. Who should bear the costs of systems with multiple users?”.
Other key issues discussed at the seminar included privacy and data usage. In countries such as Chile and Argentina, tax data can be accessed in addition to social security information and a person´s employment history. A number of solutions suggested in the expert panel discussion included selective data-sharing among agencies, with security protocols to establish how much each agency actually needs, with different levels of access and presentation of employee ID required by staff dealing with the data.
Valentina Barca said that caution must be exercised regarding continuous updating and centralized control of registries in a federal system: “There is a danger of systematically excluding some families due to data collection problems. Given the requirements for national identification, the poorest are also the most excluded, and an overall national approach alone does not generally reflect local scenarios”.
In Brazil, a serious complicating factor impeding integration is the lack of a single means of civil identification, since civil registration is a function of the individual states. While Brazil´s Unified Registry is regarded as having successfully overcome this situation, the Registry´s interoperability with other databases remains a challenge.
Joana Mostafa, Director of the Unified Register in the Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Hunger, commented: “We cannot take any immediate or all-encompassing measures. The question of integration has been on our agenda for a long time, and I believe we can solve it step-by- step in bilateral as well as multilateral agendas. “
Access Joana Mostafa’s presentation to the seminar participants (in Portuguese)
Marco Prates, WWP