Rodrigo Marques had no idea that his initial inquiry into DevInfo would eventually transform municipal planning efforts in his city.
A project coordinator with the municipal planning department of Pinhais, a city of 120,000 in Brazil’s southern Paraná state, Marques was responsible for city planning and improving public service delivery. Along with other colleagues in his department, however, he found himself increasingly sidetracked by requests from other public administration staff, who always seemed to need information on various municipal indicators.
|
|
Pinhais city, Paraná state, Brazil |
|
Two years ago, Marques began looking for strategic planning tools that would make his department’s work more efficient. Through the outreach efforts of ORBIS, a Brazilian NGO and UNICEF Brazil partner also based in Paraná, Marques came to hear about DevInfo and how it could be applied to strengthen municipal planning efforts.
Excited by the possibilities, municipal authorities in Pinhais contacted ORBIS in 2010, who agreed to assist the municipality in introducing DevInfo technology to help better track and monitor municipal indicators.
The first step involved a series of DevInfo training workshops for public administration employees. Beginning in mid-2010, municipal staff became familiarized with the software, and a small team was trained in database administration. Upon completion of the workshops, the newly-trained team constructed a database housing all the municipal urban indicators.
With a view to bringing all municipal departments onto the same platform, DevInfo was then introduced to Pinhais’ Education Department. One of the department’s staff created a new database – Educ Pinhais – containing 58 education indicators for 84 areas, including 15 sub-municipal areas. The department has since made this database available via intranet to all municipal staff, who now have instant access to information about schools, hospitals, day care centers and other local infrastructure.
The eventual goal is for all of the public departments in Pinhais to develop their own databases, containing data on department-specific indicators at the sub-municipal level.
|
|
Introducing DevInfo to municipal
employees in Pinhais |
“DevInfo is convenient and easy to use,” affirms Marques. “You can arrange the data any way you want, you can access the data online, and you can view data for multiple indicators from several different areas in a single window.” Even more importantly, he notes, DevInfo offers city planners far richer benefits in terms of enhanced planning and analysis capabilities.
Explains Angelo Tadini, Project Analyst with ORBIS, “In general, municipal planners lack good data to compare their city with other cities. To address this gap, ORBIS has released an online DevInfo database containing socio-economic data for all Brazilian municipalities. Using DevInfo, municipalities can now compare their child mortality rates, for example, against the national rate, the state rate, and the rates of other municipalities with a comparable population and tax base. Besides all this, with DevInfo you can monitor and track data for sub-municipal indicators. All of this is very critical to planning.”
With DevInfo quickly becoming integrated in the city’s public administration, Marques is now freed up to resume focus on city planning, and the municipality stands to gain immensely from better monitoring of local indicators – definitely a win-win scenario for the people of Pinhais.
|
