Vienna, Virginia, USA – 04 August, 2014 – Rwanda’s process for coordinating the many international NGOs working in the country is about to get a major overhaul. Rwanda’s Directorate General of Immigration and Emigration (DGIE) has engaged Synergy International Systems, Inc., a leading Washington, D.C. area software firm, to develop an Integrated INGO Database in order to better manage efforts to fight poverty and foster socioeconomic development.

The Development Assistance Database (DAD) Community of Practice (CoP) is happy to announce the completion of the 2011 Global Conference & Training, which took place from 20-24 June in Synergy International Systems’ Global Learning Center in Yerevan, Armenia. This year’s event brought together about 40 practitioners from 16 countries, including Armenia, Cameroon, Iraq, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritania, Moldova, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, Somalia and Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, and the United States.
The week-long conference consisted of a three-day workshop and a two-day training program. The workshop gave the participants an opportunity to present their country experiences in establishing the DAD or other Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) information systems. In particular, the participants discussed and brainstormed common challenges related to timely and reliable data reporting, challenges to and opportunities for linking M&E systems to decision-making processes, and the sustainability of government management information systems.

The two-day training program, which included ten sessions, was led by senior Synergy staff and covered a wide range of topics such as M&E Data Collection and Quality Assessment, M&E Analytics and Reporting, and the DAD Implementation Process.

The conference also offered an exciting cultural program. The roundtables of the third day of the workshop were held in a scenic location overlooking the 1st century A.D. temple of Garni. The participants also visited a number of historic sites, including the ancient Cathedral of Etchmiadzin and the architectural splendor of the Geghard monastery. The participants also enjoyed the lively and moving sounds of the “Little Singers of Armenia,” a world-famous children’s ensemble that performs traditional Armenian music.

The evaluation survey completed after the conference clearly showed that the event was highly successful in meeting the participants’ expectations. And the participants were unanimously excited about being part of a vibrant community of professionals who can benefit from one another’s experience and knowledge. As Mr. Christopher Oisebe, Chief Economist of Kenya’s Ministry of Finance and the Manager of the Electronic Projects Monitoring Information System (ePro-MIS), put it, “DAD is now a family of practitioners. Let us all continue to strengthen our ties in order to advance our knowledge and skills and to improve our development efforts.”

On June 14, 2011, the Government of Sri Lanka launched the Integrated National Development Information System (INDIS), a web-based application developed by Synergy for the Ministry of Finance and Planning to manage the entire portfolio of development projects, be they financed by domestic or external resources. The launch was attended by senior government officials, including Dr. P. B. Jayasundera, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Mrs. Malanie Gamage, the Director General of Foreign Aid and Budget Monitoring. Synergy has been working with the Government of Sri Lanka, in close collaboration with UNDP, since the 2004 Asian Tsunami, which heavily affected the country.

In 2005, the Ministry of Planning established the Development Assistance Database (DAD) Sri Lanka to track the thousands of post-tsunami assistance projects. From 2005-2010, the system went through successive stages of evolution, from initially tracking only post-tsunami reconstruction to eventually covering the entire external assistance portfolio. But the existence of multiple related but disconnected information systems imposed a serious management burden on the Sri Lankan government. Therefore, the government decided to establish a truly integrated enterprise Monitoring and Evaluation information system that would provide a complete picture of government performance and national development. Indeed, INDIS goes beyond project monitoring; it also helps assess the performance of ministries and sectoral developments, as well as being a searchable e-registry of all project evaluations.

The INDIS is, at its core, a decision-support tool designed to enable policymakers to assess project performance and results in real-time and take decisions on corrective actions and resource allocation. And its establishment comes at the right time, as the government has recently rolled out a number of key capital investment projects in water resources, energy, and road development.

A major part of the INDIS project was to integrate various government information systems into one unified system to achieve efficient information management, coupled with advanced analytical and reporting capabilities. In his remarks during the launch ceremony, Dr. Fredrick Abeyratne, Senior Programme Analyst of UNDP, thanked Synergy “for doing a wonderful job of integrating systems…and adding new features.”

On June 16, 2011, the Government of Iraq launched the Iraq Development Management System (IDMS) at a high-level ceremony in Baghdad. The event was sponsored by the Iraqi Prime Minister Mr. Nouri Al-Maliki and attended by ministers, governors, and deputy ministers, as well as over ten ambassadors.

The IDMS is a comprehensive bilingual (Arabic/English) web-based application that manages the whole cycle of government and donor-funded development projects in Iraq. It allows ministries to plan, manage, and monitor the full lifecycle of capital investment projects from start to finish in an online environment. It is designed to help monitor the implementation of Iraq’s National Development Plan (NDP) 2010-2014, which envisages about 3000 development projects with a total value of $100 billion over five years.

At a deeper level, this innovative government tool marks a break with paper-based forms of capital investment planning and monitoring used to date, which tended to be burdensome and vulnerable to misuse of public funds. By contrast, the IDMS is an electronic tool that allows real-time collection, analysis, and reporting of development data. Also, by being publicly accessible on the Internet, it can advance government transparency and accountability by showing how public resources are being spent and what development results are being achieved.

According to Christine McNab, the Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Iraq, “the IDMS is a major reform of part of the public sector and an ambitious e-governance application,” and it would not have been possible without “the technical prowess of Synergy International Systems.” It was designed and developed by Synergy for the Ministry of Planning in 2010, with assistance and funding from USAID/Tatweer, UNDP, UNOPS, the EU, and the Government of Spain.

The IDMS builds upon the highly successful Development Assistance Database (DAD), which Synergy developed in 2005 for the Ministry of Planning to manage external assistance for Iraq’s post-conflict reconstruction. Following the successful federal-regional arrangement adopted for the DAD, IDMS will be accompanied by a regional application for the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the two applications will be fully synchronized.

Synergy will continue to work closely with the Ministry of Planning to ensure that all Ministries, Governorates, and donor organizations use the system effectively so as to perform their functions and meet their information needs.

In April 2011, Synergy conducted a week-long training in Abuja as part of the ongoing implementation of Development Assistance Database (DAD) Nigeria. DAD Nigeria is the federal government’s central information system on all external assistance to the country. The training marked the beginning of an intensive capacity development phase following the set-up of the actual online system, which is now fully operational.

Synergy experts trained about 15 donor focal points who have been tasked by their respective agencies to use the system to regularly report data on their development projects. Trainings were also provided to government users and particularly the DAD Nigeria Team of the National Planning Commission (NPC), in such areas as system administration, user management, data validation, and the production of analytical reports. Synergy will continue to work closely with the NPC, as well as the UNDP Country Office, to support the capacity of the Nigerian government to manage the system in a way that ensures the availability of timely and accurate data and that makes policy-relevant information readily available to decision-makers.

Synergy was recently awarded a contract to implement the Development Assistance Database (DAD) Mauritania, which will be the Mauritanian government’s one-stop-shop information system on all external assistance projects and activities funded by development partners. The system will be fully customized to meet the specific requirements of the government, and it will be available online in Arabic and French.

The Mauritanian delegation of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Development recently participated in the 2011 DAD Community of Practice in Armenia, where they had the opportunity to learn about the experience of other countries in setting up DAD systems for managing and monitoring external assistance and public investment projects. The DAD Mauritania project is financed by UNDP.

In December 2010, at the invitation of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MINECOFIN) of the Government of Rwanda, Synergy staff carried out a needs assessment for the expansion of the Development Assistance Database (DAD). The DAD has been the Government’s aid information management system since its implementation in March 2006, and has continued to evolve over time to serve the needs of MINECOFIN.

The mission focused on how to best position the DAD, both technically and programmatically, to serve the primary goals of the Government in both the immediate and long-term future. These include the capture of all external assistance data within the national budget; the integration of the DAD with the Government’s Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS); as well as more effectively linking specific project results and development expenditures with national strategic goals.

Rwanda is currently a remarkable model in Africa when it comes to the relationship between external assistance management and national development results. Assisted by the DAD, the External Finance Unit within the MINECOFIN can provide institutions within the government with the necessary data on external financing and projects, thus allowing these institutions to better target their own interventions and allocate their resources.

It is Synergy’s long-held view that national ownership is paramount to the success of DAD. We aim to continue working closely with the Government of Rwanda to support its DAD Team, promote the participation of other government institutions, and improve data collection processes and the quality of information to enhance the Government’s decision-making capabilities.

In the age of global austerity, governments are increasingly interested in linking spending to results. Interestingly, developing countries are, in some ways, at the forefront of the trend toward results-oriented governance. The governments of Iraq and Sri Lanka are in the processes of setting up sophisticated systems to plan, implement, and monitor public investment projects—development projects funded under the government’s capital budget. The overarching purpose of both initiatives is to promote a culture of informed decision-making, where decisions about capital investment funding are based on performance and results.

In Iraq, Synergy is developing a new, comprehensive Iraq Development Management System (IDMS) to help the Iraqi Government plan, implement, and monitor and evaluate the entirety of the country’s capital budget which, comprising domestic as well as external resources, is estimated at around $200 billion over the next 5 years.

This project builds upon the successful implementation of the Development Assistance Database (DAD) Iraq, which, established in 2005, served as the Government’s online repository of information and analytical and reporting tool on donor contributions to Iraq’s post-conflict reconstruction and development. DAD will now be integrated into the new system.

The Ministry of Planning, which used to manage DAD, is the government agency responsible for IDMS, with the support of UNDP, USAID, and UNOPS. A highly innovative aspect of IDMS is its Business Process Management (BPM) component, which will automate key business processes pertaining to externally-funded and government investment projects. The BPM will allow ministries, provincial authorities, donors and other stakeholders to submit, review, and approve or reject project requests online through IDMS. Thus, it will serve as a standardized and open mechanism for Iraqi public entities involved in capital investment management.

In Sri Lanka, Synergy is developing the government’s Integrated National Development Information System (INDIS), which, similar to the Iraqi system, will be the unified system on development projects funded by donors and the national government. Moreover, the system will contain an advanced performance monitoring capability to track the performance and results of specific projects and activities as well as, at a broader level, of public entities and sectors. INDIS will be housed and managed by the Foreign Aid & Budget Monitoring Department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning, with the support of UNDP.

The Sri Lankan case is instructive for it describes the general situation in many countries and how governments can go about to change it. Prior to the INDIS initiative, the government had set up different systems that managed different aspects of the overall development agenda—a system for managing external assistance projects, another for public investment projects, and yet another for government evaluations of projects. But having separate systems that did not speak with each other resulted in silos of information, making it hard to get a full and clear picture of the country’s development landscape. Thus, the Sri Lankan Government decided to create INDIS in order to have a unifying platform with real-time and reliable data, which could then promote evidence-based and strategic decision-making on national development.

In both countries, Synergy is focusing on capacity development. We are working closely with the lead government agency to train its staff as well as users in other public entities to make sure they can fully use and manage the system.

In keeping with Synergy’s focus on training as a means of ensuring user satisfaction and system sustainability, our expert trainers have carried out several intensive training programs in the closing months of 2010. In December, Synergy conducted an E-Governance Web Portal Training Workshop in Amman, Jordan, for Iraqi government officials. The E-Governance Web Portal is an essential building block for the Government of Iraq in providing public service content to the Iraqi people in both the immediate and long term. In establishing a platform that connects the government and the citizenry, the portal facilitates increased public awareness of and participation in government decision-making processes.

The Amman sessions were active and intensive, with participants from the ministries of Science & Technology, Communications, Health and Interior, as well as officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Council of Ministers Secretariat. Training sessions worked through the portal’s content management, collaboration, and administration tools. On the whole, the Iraqi delegation was enthusiastic and satisfied with the sessions, which were conducted in Arabic and English.

In a training conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in late November, Somali government officials participated in an interactive workshop on the newly implemented DAD Somalia. In addition to discussing the conceptual role of the Development Assistance Database in promoting alignment, harmonization, transparency, and effective management for results, our trainers worked with the participants on the latest DAD technology, including new online data entry, monitoring and evaluation, analytics and reporting, and system administration.

Training serves a dual purpose in the implementation of our management information systems (MIS/GIS). In training end-users on how to use our software applications and leading discussions on the role that these systems can play in promoting effective governance, we also endeavor to elicit their feedback. Client feedback is invaluable in allowing us to fine-tune the solutions continuously and rapidly in line with their needs. More broadly, such feedback helps us refine our technology so that it continues to be innovative and user-friendly.

In post-disaster contexts, rapidly deployable and flexible information management systems are crucial. They support informed decision-making by tracking actionable information, help monitor the progress of recovery and reconstruction activities, and ensure that funds are spent transparently and effectively.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) is the special Haitian-international body set up after the January 12 earthquake to plan, coordinate, and monitor development priorities and projects for the country’s recovery. A key part of its mandate is to review and approve projects and programs funded by bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, and the private sector. The Commission has so far received more than $1.6 billion in new project proposals on various aspects of Haiti’s recovery and development, including agriculture, education, and disaster preparedness.

In close partnership with the IHRC, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti, Synergy developed an innovative Project Submission and Monitoring System to help the IHRC lead the recovery process. The system allows organizations (donors, NGOs, the private sector) to submit project “concept notes” (or proposals) and report approved or existing projects through intelligent online forms. The IHRC reviews proposals for approval and monitors ongoing projects for effective implementation.

“Our goal is to support the Haitian government and its international partners in their collective effort to rebuild Haiti through a transparent, results-driven, and ultimately effective and sustainable approach,” said Synergy’s CEO Dr. Ashot Hovanesian.

The system features a powerful workflow capability that enables the review, feedback, revision and approval processes. The system is customizable in that it provides registered users with a personalized workspace, known as “My Portfolio,” for managing their portfolio of draft or submitted concept notes and projects. Moreover, an “organization profile” feature is being developed to provide a summary, consolidated view of each organization, including its financial contribution and areas of intervention.

The project submission and monitoring system is available on the IHRC’s website at www.cirh.ht and also on the Haiti Reconstruction Platform (HRP) at www.refondation.ht, which is the Haitian government’s one-stop-shop on recovery data. It is important to note that the data in the IHRC system and in the Haiti Reconstruction Platform are stored in one comprehensive back-end database system for further analysis, report generation, and automatic publishing of analytics on portals. Using its software technology, Synergy developed the HRP and the back-end database system.