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Please be aware that the content herein has not been peer reviewed. It consists of personal reflections, insights, and learnings of the contributor(s). It may not be exhaustive, nor does it aim to be authoritative knowledge.
Title
Please provide a name for your action learning plan.
Experiment a resilient, affordable, and replicable data management system and protocol for areas affected by the war in Northern Ethiopia
Challenge statement
Challenge type: If you are working on multiple challenges, please indicate if this is your "big bet" or "exploratory" challenge.
Please note: we ask you to only submit a maximum of 3 challenges - 1x Big Bet, 2x Exploratory. Each challenge must be submitted individually.
BIG BET
Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)
Our challenge is How might we design, develop, and test a data management system and protocol that is resilient to the crisis, affordable and replicable for government offices in areas affected by the war in Northern Ethiopia to ensure business continuity and public service delivery.
Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?
Amhara region and particularly its northern section was left off several livelihoods and institutional damages due to the war in northern Ethiopia on top of COVID-19, negative social and economic repercussions. This has been causing disruption the public services that have to rely on data sources such as the justice system, financial and economic sectors, health services, etc. Therefore, having a data recovery mechanism could ease the work process and improve data driven decisions and interventions in the socioeconomic sector, serving justice to the public, and setting other government services.
The UNDP through the consultation of regional, zonal and Woreda level government stakeholders, has made an in-depth exploration of the war induced social and economic problems, designed an Amhara recovery project. The project has multiple output components such as ensuring continuity of critical government functions; strengthening capacity of the regional government to plan, implement and monitor rehabilitation, restoration, and recovery initiatives; enabling restart of economic activities; and supporting mental health and psychosocial support to those affected. The core focus will be on restoring state capacity and ability to deliver services. Particular attention will be given to most vulnerable women, whose income and assets have been depleted due to the ongoing conflict as well as those who have been the victims of GBV, their households (especially children) and youth (notably, young men who are currently without work or any income) (The project Prodoc).
Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.
The data recovery initiative has been very important as the public and government services have been disrupted due to the data losses occurred in the region. Data losses captured in the explored area are indicated below.
Justice office= 100% loss of criminal and civil case files , while some possibilities to recover criminal related documentations from the court
Civil service=1,221 employees personal history files lost, this has made HR related tasks difficult
BOFEC=Loss was minimal as the data they had were also in hard copies. These are budget and development plans
Revenue=231 level one taxpayer documentations were lost. Ledger was lost and this made traceability a challenge. Audit files worth of 20 million ETB were lost
Trade office=1,138 original data losses, therefore it made business license renewal impossible for 375 businesses
Jobs=700 business enterprises data files were lost
Land management + urban plan and development=8k survey data was lost and out of it ~1k was recovered as it was registered online. For urban development and plan office, Out of the 8k files, 1,300 are left not recovered from individual users’ copied files
Plan and development=social media and free web-based archives are difficult to retrieve data in an organized matter
Culture and tourism=Artifacts registration data lost
Qualitative evidence: What weak signals have you recently spotted that characterizes its urgency? Please provide qualitative information that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge. You can add text, a link, or a picture.
The northern Ethiopia war has opened the vulnerability of Lalibela city administration and Lasta Woreda for considerable data loss for internally caused data destructions and external damages and robbery of data along with data storage systems and computers. The former damage cause refers to data losses caused by individuals or groups of residents to fulfill their financial, material, and justice needs, while the latter is caused by the war aggressors act to intentionally destroy data that were stored in computers as well as hard copies archived with in warehouses constructed by rudimentary materials. As a result, the government offices functions are slightly, or partly disrupted. This has brought frustrations by the government officers and experts as their routine way of doings have become cumbersome due to lost data or messed archived evidences, which made traceability of documentations an extreme challenge. On the other hand the service recipient community is dissatisfied as they have received whether an incomplete service or return without getting the right service. Among many problems, loss of prosecution related documents, land agreements and land titles, enterprises sales and financial documents, human resource personal files have critically affected government business. This will ultimately impact on lack of access to justice and poor area-based security analysis, improper revenue collection and loss of some businesses, unfulfilled rights of employees for promotions based on performances on personal files, etc.
Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?
Quantification of the losses has been also important to design resilient data management and sustainable public services in the explored area. New and resilient solutions will be scaled at regional level provided that they are proved through experimentation.
Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?
How can we use cloud computing as an enabler to minimize data loss and introduce possible data regeneration methods?
How might we connect regional and federal data systems for data management?
Partners
Who are your top 5 partners for this challenge? Please submit from MOST to LEAST important and state Name, Sector and a brief description of the (intended) collaboration.
Please state the name of the Parter:
Norther regional states
What sector does our partner belong to?
Government (&related)
Please provide a brief description of the collaboration.
UNDP Ethiopia had proceeded consecutive missions towards to the Amhara and Afar regions to explore the socioeconomic and governance aspects of the war repercussions at different tires ranging the senior leadership and expert's levels. The country in collaboration with the lab missions had resulted in the Amhara recovery plan, which addresses socioeconomic and psychosocial aspects of losses. Moreover, to support the government’s business continuity the recovery plan has offered logistical support such as vehicles, computers, servers, other office equipment along with human capacity buildings. The Amhara recovery project has already identified the most affected parts of the region of Wag-Hemera and North Wollo Zones (comprising of areas such as Lalibella, Gashena and Woldia), as well as parts of South Wollo Zone (including Dessie and Kombolcha) were prioritized. The project plans to support each Woreda and the public institutions/sector offices in these areas need to get in-kind support such as computers and other IT equipment, which are essential in the data generation and handling system. Following that the lab has planned to collaborate in singled out the data element for further experimentation on how cloud computing is a practical way to manage data at the district level in Ethiopia to devise a resilient data handling system, despite future potential shocks.
Is this a new and unusual partner for UNDP?
Yes
Who are your top 5 partners for this challenge? Please submit from MOST to LEAST important and state Name, Sector and a brief description of the (intended) collaboration.
Please state the name of the Parter:
UNDP Amhara Recovery Project
What sector does our partner belong to?
United Nations
Please provide a brief description of the collaboration.
UNDP Ethiopia had proceeded consecutive missions towards to the Amhara and Afar regions to explore the socioeconomic and governance aspects of the war repercussions at different tires ranging the senior leadership and expert's levels. The country in collaboration with the lab missions had resulted in the Amhara recovery plan, which addresses socioeconomic and psychosocial aspects of losses. Moreover, to support the government’s business continuity the recovery plan has offered logistical support such as vehicles, computers, servers, other office equipment along with human capacity buildings. The Amhara recovery project has already identified the most affected parts of the region of Wag-Hemera and North Wollo Zones (comprising of areas such as Lalibella, Gashena and Woldia), as well as parts of South Wollo Zone (including Dessie and Kombolcha) were prioritized. The project plans to support each Woreda and the public institutions/sector offices in these areas need to get in-kind support such as computers and other IT equipment, which are essential in the data generation and handling system. Following that the lab has planned to collaborate in singled out the data element for further experimentation on how cloud computing is a practical way to manage data at the district level in Ethiopia to devise a resilient data handling system, despite future potential shocks.
Is this a new and unusual partner for UNDP?
No
Learning questions
Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?
1) How might we connect regional and federal data systems for data management?
2) Is data management seen as an institutional responsibility or an individual employee?
3) Is cloud computing a practical way to manage data at the district level in Ethiopia?
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Explore, Test, Grow
Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
We will use a participatory and human-centered design process that includes the stakeholders in the early stages of design. This involvement of stakeholders and end users together allows the design process to be more open to considering the UX. The participatory design lends itself to user-centered design innovation since it nurtures a more creative development atmosphere. We will use the below steps along the learning cycle
- Brainstorm.
- Cocreate
- User: Job/Task Scenario
- Developers: System Components.
- Iterative testing
Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
Using this source of data will enable us to engage different government sub offices at Lasta Woreda, and Lalibela city administrations and address data gaps like what data has been lost, the extent of loose, adaptation strategies followed to revive the normal government functions, IT-related expertise profiles and existing capacities, how does the experimented suggested local solutions under their context, etc will connect regional and federal data systems for data management.
Closing
Early leads to grow: Think about the possible grow phase for this challenge - who might benefit from your work on this challenge or who might be the champions in your country that you should inform or collaborate with early on to help you grow this challenge?
Users will be government offices in Lasta worded and the city of Lalibela like the Justice and Prosecutor’s Office, Civil service office, In the Customs and Revenue office, woreda trade office, Lasta woreda and Lalibela Beuro of fiancé and Economic commission (BOFEC), the Culture and tourism office and Land management office and he Urban and infrastructure office
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9Industry, innovation and infrastructure
11Sustainable cities and communities
17Partnerships for the goals
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