Valuing the Chain: Design Thinking for Nigerian Public Policy Development
To lay the foundation for this article, here is a story of how a seemingly casual change in fiscal policy resulted in deaths.
In 2017, the federal government decided to reduce the import duty on milk from 10% to 5%. Import duty is a levy imposed on imported goods and sometimes acts as a protectionist measure to make local goods more competitive on prices. Milk is fairly homogenous, so if a local brand is cheaper than an imported one chances are you buy the local brand. However, this was a reduction of the import duty and it meant that the international rivals (who are a lot bigger financially than local manufacturers and can lower their prices to take a loss longer than smaller businesses can) became fresh competition on price for the local manufacturers. This development discouraged, and put out, a lot of indigenous entrepreneurs. It also significantly reduced the amount of new investment going into the dairy market.
The negative externalities of this policy, however, did not stop there.
Most of the milk we consume, and that is sold in our markets, come from cows. In Nigeria, cow herders are typically of northern descent and particularly of an ethnic group known as the Fulani or Fula people. When the revenue from milk sales is good, the Fulani cow herders are incentivised to keep their cows stationary and in barns. This is because the less distance a cow covers, the more milk it produces. When the revenues from milk sales are not so good, they prefer to herd the cows for their meat. What this means is that the cows roam and seek more green pastures to ‘beef up’. Although this change in rearing behaviour due to increased competition may be regarded as fundamental and without consequence in many parts of the world, in Nigeria it is a recipe for violence.
I’ll explain.
The adverse effect of climate change has meant that natural resources like water and arable farmland have become more scarce. A grazing reserve system created in 1965 which set aside land, water and vaccinations for livestocks herders in return for direct taxes has long been abandoned. Therefore, those engaged in occupations like farming and livestock herding have been left exposed to increased volatility in yield caused by uncertainty of inputs. Without access to insurance, the stakes of getting a good or bad harvest are high. Historically, this had raised tensions between both groups. With an increase in interaction between farmers (who wanted to use the land for growing crops) and hostile herders (who sought out grazing pastures), a breakout of conflict ensued. According to this report, between September 2017 and June 2018, farmer-herder violence was the primary cause of 1,500 deaths, wounding many others and displacing about 300,000.
Yet there is more.
The Agricultural Promotion Policy (or APP for short) is the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture’s intervention in the agriculture industry. The policy is focused on driving productivity growth in the sector through private sector-led investments that create inclusive employment for poor and marginalised citizens - this report found agriculture-driven GDP growth to be 300% more effective in raising incomes of the poorest than growth driven by other sectors. The strengthening of the value chain, by ensuring that growth significantly raised the income of the poor, is pegged as the key instrument in achieving this. However, due to the implementation of a misaligned fiscal policy measure, the gains made by the APP approach in the dairy industry were lost. With less investment many disadvantaged citizens, like women who had historically been marginalised, were made redundant due to the closure of dairy companies. These kinds of events are not peculiar to just the dairy industry. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that the agricultural sector received the lowest credit dispensed by private investors between 2016 and 2017. And this research, conducted on the role of the government in driving investment, revealed that an absence of good and stable policies were key reasons for capital flight.
My question then is this: if you know a policy move may directly or indirectly result in negative externalities including an undoing of social gains and the possible loss of lives, why make it? Unless you did not know. If this is to be the explanation; that a lack of insight of policy impact is the reason for poor policy development and implementation, then I conclude that our current policy development process lacks the rudimentary element of good design.
Before you go on, give me a brief of your points
Bad policy can have far reaching consequences on all the citizens of a country, therefore;
Policy makers should adopt an approach to the development of policies led by historic data and collective foresight, this happens by;
Employing a wide range voices from the ‘users’ of these policies, undergoing policy prototyping before roll out and implementing redress mechanisms.
One framework for doing this is called Design Thinking.
Okay. What is this design thinking you talk about?
The concept of design thinking has been around for a long time. As far back as the 1960s, MIT inventor Buckminister Fuller had been exploring the potential of technology process flows in advancing a utopia. He created systematic methods to evaluate, design and solve problems. Rare for that period, his design teams comprised of experts from across disciplines as opposed to just designers. This approach resonates with the design thinking of today because his teams were people who brought varying expert perspectives from their different fields to contribute to the goal of a project. By employing a breadth of perspective to include that of the users (or in this case the citizens), policymakers can avoid systemic failures of policies similar to the kind we have seen in the past.
While policy development is a design activity, it is rarely spoken about in design terms. According to a definition by the global centre for public service excellence, design thinking is an ‘explicit human and user-centred approach to policy development that puts end-users needs at the centre of the policy formulation system’. It focuses on collecting primary data using ethnographic based research that helps to identify unarticulated user needs, design criteria and problem definition. Here, policy development begins with a story heard from ‘the horses’ mouth’. This information is then used for a problem development. Brainstorming from a wide range of perspectives follows and fuels concept solutions that are trialed and tested. If successful, the policy solution is rolled out.
Jené v.d Heever | skillssociety.ca
A practical example of this in use can be found in the South Australian government’s approach to helping families experiencing difficulties. After consulting citizens to get clarity on the problem, representatives of the government held family by family meetings and asked the simple question of “how can a new service enable more families to thrive and fewer to come into contact with crisis services?” The feedback from this served as the basis for solution prototyping. Following the success of this, with a return on investment rate of $7 per dollar, the programme was extended to neighbouring states. Today, multiple government facilities across the world, like the Public Policy Lab in New York and the Policy Lab in the UK, are following this model and exploring how design thinking in public policy can help make their citizen’s lives better.
So design thinking for president then?
Although the benefits of implementing a design thinking approach to policy making are clear to see, adoption of this approach within the local context might be easier said (or written) than done for numerous reasons. Here is one: the Nigerian government is made up of individuals born in the 1940s and 1950s and, as explained in this article, these individuals are often change averse. Yet, it is clear to see that acute discrepancies between empirical findings and theoretical postulations have limited policy effectiveness and led to the failure of government objectives. There is an urgent need for policies to be guided by data gathered from the ‘voice of the masses’. People should have a say in policies that affect them. The prevalent culture of information being passed down from older people (who tend to be in more senior positions) to younger people (who tend to be in more junior positions) in a top-down feedback system needs to be challenged as it has left little room for a reverse/bottom-up approach. It has also fed the modus operandi within public sector organisations and influenced the policy chain; policymakers have shown inadequacy in their hypothesis-testing abilities, exhibiting a preference for easy-fix board room conceived solutions. Therefore, as is obvious, any lasting solution will have to begin with a change in the policy makers perception of the civil service seat and its functions within society. Our democratically voted policy makers must be people who identify as public servants, and who have both the empathy and experience required to serve.
Policymakers must do away with flimsy problem definition and focus on enlisting a broad group of stakeholders to help build a clear awareness of issues that enables them to develop solutions from a shared vantage point. These solutions should be prototyped and tested before being rolled out to the entire populace. Subsequently, redress mechanisms that enables citizens to raise grievances when they perceive negative impacts of policies should be implemented. Government agencies may also choose to contract independent consultancies to conduct periodic impact assessments that uncover information about the positive or negative, intended or unintended, direct or indirect impact of any policy intervention. This will ensure that the systemic problems are identified as quickly as possible.
If policymakers fail to employ and engage with the voices of the citizens in the early stages of policy development, they may still have to contend with these voices in less-cordial ways when policies do fail. After a move to ban the use of motorcycle taxis (or ‘Okada’) by the Lagos State government, protesters took to the streets, citing a lack of empathy on the side of the government as their motivation, and calling for regulation of the taxis instead of a total ban. In a separate event, protesters rallied against the Federal government’s proposed response to a previous rally against police brutality and insecurity.
As opposed to a back and forth of policy development and policy failure, a design thinking led approach to policy making will allow for synergic collaboration between policy makers and takers. By addressing the potential negative externalities of a policy at its ideation stage, policy makers can improve the likelihood of a successful intervention and effectively deliver on the mandates they were voted in to enact.
Tolu Oni is a Director and Lead at Thread Strategy.