Indicator 16.6.2 Proportion of population satisfied with their last experience of public services

Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

Target 16.6: Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels

Indicator 16.6.2: Proportion of population satisfied with their last experience of public services

Annually

2022

1.4.1,

Kenya National Bureau of Statistics

Senior Manager, Social Statistics Division

Social Statistics Division

Collect, collate, compile, analyze, publish and disseminate administrative data on Governance, Peace and Security, health, education and gender statistics

+254735004401, +254202911000, +254202911001

30266-00100 NAIROBI

dpss@knbs.or.ke

Definition:

This indicator measures levels of public satisfaction with people’s last experience with public services, in the three service areas of healthcare, education and government services (i.e. services to obtain government-issued identification documents and services for the civil registration of life events such as births, marriages and deaths). This is a survey-based indicator which emphasizes citizens’ experiences over general perceptions, with an eye on measuring the availability and quality of services as they were actually delivered to survey respondents.

Concepts:

Public services:

As stated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “States are responsible for delivering a variety of services to their populations, including education, health and social welfare services. The provision of these services is essential to the protection of human rights such as the right to housing, health, education and food. The role of the public sector as service provider or regulator of the private provision of services is crucial for the realization of all human rights, particularly social and economic rights. Additionally, the African Charter on Values and Principles of Public Service and Administration defines a public service as “Any service or public-interest activity that is under the authority of the government administration”.

Public services ‘of general interest’:

The methodology for SDG 16.6.2 carefully defines the scope of healthcare and education services to ensure that the focus is placed on services that are truly of general interest. In the case of healthcare services, for instance, preventive and primary healthcare services can be said to be truly ‘of general interest’: these services are relevant to everyone and they are most commonly found in both urban and rural areas. This might not be the case for hospitals that provide tertiary care, and as such hospital and specialist care is excluded from the questions on healthcare services. Likewise, in the case of education services, primary and lower secondary education services can be said to be truly ‘of general interest’, given their universality. University education, however, is excluded from the questions on education services.

‘Last experience’ of public services in the past 12 months: Indicator 16.6.2 focuses on respondents’ ‘last experience of public services’, and specifies a reference period of “the past 12 months” to avoid telescoping effects and to minimize memory bias effects. This means that only respondents who will have used healthcare, education and government services in the past 12 months will proceed to answer the survey questions.

Service-specific standards – or ‘attributes’:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights explains that “A human rights-based approach to public services is integral to the design, delivery, implementation and monitoring of all public service provision. Firstly, the normative human rights framework provides an important legal yardstick for measuring how well public service is designed and delivered and whether the benefits reach rights-holders”. For instance, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights specifies that “The availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of health-related services should be facilitated and controlled by States. This duty extends to a variety of health-related services ranging from controlling the spread of infectious diseases to ensuring maternal health and adequate facilities for children.” Similarly, with respect to education services, the same Committee underlines that “States should adopt a human rights approach to ensure that [education services are] of an adequate standard and do not exclude any child on the basis of race, religion, geographical location or any other defining characteristic.

Healthcare services:

The questions on healthcare services focus on respondents’ experiences (or that of a child in their household who needed treatment and was accompanied by the respondent) with primary healthcare services (over the past 12 months) – that is, basic health care services provided by a government/public health clinic, or covered by a public health system. It can include health care services provided by private institutions, as long as such services are provided at reduced (or no) cost to beneficiaries, under a public health system. Respondents are specifically asked not to include in their answers any experience they might have had with hospital or specialist medical care services (for example, if they had a surgery), or with dental care and teeth exams (because in many countries, dentalcare is not covered by publicly funded healthcare systems). Attributes-based questions on healthcare services focus on 1) Accessibility (related to geographic proximity, delay in getting appointment, waiting time to see doctor on day of appointment); 2) Affordability; 3) Quality of facilities; 4) Equal

treatment for everyone; and 5) Courtesy and treatment (attitude of healthcare staff).

Education services: The questions on education services focuses on respondents’ experience with the public school system over the past 12 months, that is, if there are children in their household whose age falls within the age range spanning primary and secondary education in the country. Public schools are defined as “those for which no private tuition fees or major payments must be paid by the parent

or guardian of the child who is attending the school; they are state-funded schools.” Respondents are asked to respond separately for primary and secondary schools if children in their household attend school at different levels. Attributes-based questions on education services focus on 1) Accessibility (with a focus on geographic proximity); 2) Affordability; 3) Quality of facilities; 4) Equal treatment for

everyone; and 5) Effective delivery of service (Quality of teaching).

Government services:

The battery on government services focuses exclusively on two types of government services: 1) Services to obtain government-issued identification documents (such as national identity cards, passports, driver’s licenses and voter’s cards) and 2) services for the civil registration of life events such as births, marriages and deaths. This particular focus on these two types of services arises from the high frequency of use of these services. Attributes-based questions on government services focus on 1) Accessibility; 2) Affordability; 3) Equal treatment for everyone; 4) Effective delivery of service (delivery process is simple and easy to understand); and 5) Timeliness.

Per cent

None

The National Ethics and Corruption Survey (NECS) 2021 was conducted in several phases: organizing the survey, consulting stakeholders, selecting samples, creating and finalizing the questionnaire, pretesting, hiring and training field staff, data collection and entry, data processing and cleaning, and finally, analysis, report writing, and production. Each stage followed international best practices in survey execution.

Sample Design

The National Ethics and Corruption Survey (NECS) 2021 had a sample size of 5,847 households spread across 600 clusters. This sample was allocated across various study domains using the power allocation method. The sampling units were selected through a two-stage process: initially, 600 clusters were chosen from the Kenya Household Master Sample Frame (KHMSF) followed by the selection of 5,847 households. These clusters were independently selected from the frame using an equal probability method, which involved organizing the clusters by unique geocodes and then drawing a sample. From each of the selected clusters, a total of 10 households were systematically sampled, starting randomly, from their respective household lists.

Training and Field work

There was a one-day training which involved 23 research assistants, supervisors and KNBS coordinators. A pre-test of the tool was carried out and feedback from the pre-test helped in revision of the research instruments.

Data Collection

Data was captured using structured questionnaires and face-to-face interviews.

Annually

2022

Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC)

Kenya National Bureau of Statistics

To promote integrity and combat corruption through law enforcement, prevention and education.

The Kenyan Government has an obligation to provide a wide range of public services that should meet the expectations of their citizens in terms of access, responsiveness and reliability/quality. When citizens cannot afford some essential services, when their geographic or electronic access to services and information is difficult, when the services provided do not respond to their needs and are of poor quality, citizens will naturally tend to report lower satisfaction not only with these services, but also with public institutions and governments. In this regard, it has been shown that citizens’ experience with front-line public services affects their trust in public institutions. Mindful of this close connection between service provision/performance, citizen satisfaction and public trust, governments are increasingly interested in better understanding citizens’ needs, experiences and preferences to be able to provide better targeted services, including for underserved populations.

Measuring satisfaction with public services is at the heart of a citizen-centered approach to service delivery and an important outcome indicator of overall government performance. Yet while a large number of countries have experience with measuring citizen satisfaction with public services, there is also large variability in the ways national statistical offices and government agencies in individual countries collect data in this area, in terms of the range of services included, the specific attributes of services examined, question wording and response formats, among other methodological considerations. This variability poses a significant challenge for cross-country comparison of such data. SDG indicator 16.6.2 aims to generate globally comparable data on satisfaction with public services. To this end, SDG 16.6.2 focuses global reporting on the three service areas of (1) healthcare, (2) education and (3) government services (i.e. services to obtain government-issued identification documents and services for the civil registration of life events such as births, marriages and deaths).

The rationale for selecting these three public services is threefold:

• First, these are ‘services of consequence’, salient for all countries and for both rural and urban populations within countries. They are also among the most common service areas covered by national household or citizen surveys on satisfaction with public services.

• Second, while healthcare and education services are covered by other SDG indicators, most of these other indicators rely on administrative sources (i.e. they do not measure people’s direct experiences and level of satisfaction with services) and are mainly focused on measuring the national coverage of a given service.

• Third, government services are not monitored under other Goals. This is a gap that indicator 16.6.2 can usefully fill, especially since Goal 16 is dedicated to enhancing governance. While Goal 16 does consider birth registration services under indicator 16.9.1, it falls short of measuring satisfaction with the services provided. With the aim of generating harmonized statistics, indicator 16.6.2 is measured through five attributes-based questions under each service area (e.g. on the accessibility and affordability of the service, the quality of facilities, etc.): The attributes-based questions are asked before the overall satisfaction question. This is based on the intention to enhance the accuracy of the proposed statistical measure on overall satisfaction – that is, to ensure that it correctly reflects the underlying concept that it is intended to capture (based on the specific attributes selected for each service). Experts in governance measurements have found that citizen satisfaction with public services is influenced not only by citizens’ previous experiences with the services, but also by citizens’ expectations. These can be influenced by cultural assumptions about the extent to which service providers should be responsive to citizens’ preferences; by broad public perception of services as communicated through the media; by individual experiences of friends, family and acquaintances; and by how service providers themselves communicate about the type of services they commit to delivering. For instance, national experiences with different question formats have shown that more highly educated respondents who interact more frequently with government (and who possibly have higher awareness of their own rights and of their government’s obligations) have higher expectations in terms of what constitutes a public service of ‘good quality’, compared to the rest of the population.

While this indicator is specific on the three service areas of public service delivery (health, education, and government services), the NECS 2021 only dealt with government services, moreover, the questions were not attribute specific (accessibility, affordability, quality of services, equal treatment for everyone, courtesy and treatment).

Since SDG 16.6.2 refers to people’s ‘last experience’ with public services, the indicator needs to focus on user experiences rather than on non-user perceptions. This selection bias inherent in this indicator with its focus on users, can result in mismeasurement due to underlying inequalities in the propensity of various groups to interact with state institutions. In other words, a focus on ‘the last experience with public services’ implicitly means that this indicator includes only those respondents who were privileged enough to access public services in the past year. This means that those (such as ethnic minorities, migrants, the elderly, undocumented workers) who have not been able – or willing – to access the healthcare, education or government services they needed in the past 12 months, often as a consequence of multiple social and economic barriers arising from overlapping forms of marginalization will be undercounted by this indicator. There is a risk therefore that overall satisfaction levels reported on 16.6.2 will over-represent the experience of more privileged groups for whom access to public services is easier, because they have the financial, logistical and intellectual means to do so, and they trust that it is in their interest to do so.

The indicator is calculated as the total number of persons who indicated that provision of services by the National Government has improved in the past 12 months over the total number of respondents in the survey

A stakeholder meeting was held for selected stakeholders before the dissemination of the NECS, 2021 survey.

None

The survey implementation process underwent a series of checks by KNBS and EACC

NECS, 2021 involved several aspects that ensured quality assurance throughout the whole survey process which involved:

• Consultative stakeholders’ meetings
• The sampling procedures and techniques employed were based on statistically robust methods that are internationally recognized and agreed upon.
• The development of the survey instruments involved multiple stakeholders
• Data cleaning, editing, validation and verification was carried out prior to the analysis and report writing stages

Members of the technical committee reviewed the report to ensure its quality

Data Availability

Data available at National level and County level.

Time Series

2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022

Disaggregation

Disaggregated by county

None

African Charter on Values and Principles: 36386-treaty-charter_on_the_principles_of_public_service_and_administration.pdf (au.int)

High Commissioner | OHCHR

National Ethics and Corruption Survey, 2021: National Ethics and Corruption Survey, 2021 Report - EACC