Welcome to the Dar es Salaam Mobile Phone Public Services Monitoring Survey.

What do citizens of Dar es Salaam think about the health care system in their city? Are medicines available when they visit public health centers and hospitals? How satisfied are they with the education that their children receive at school? How are electricity and water services working in Dar? For example, how often do citizen face power cuts and water shortages?

These are important questions that affect the lives of the 4 million-plus residents of Dar es Salaam on a daily basis. Yet despite significant resources devoted to monitoring and evaluation by government and also by donors, reliable and timely data about service delivery outcomes is rarely available. This is unfortunate, because understanding how services are being delivered and how citizens view these public services is crucial not only for government ministries and civil society organizations, but also for citizens themselves. Without such information, it is much harder for citizens to make informed decisions and hold their leaders accountable. The Dar es Salaam Mobile Phone Public Services Monitoring Survey was created as a response to this need for reliable data about public service delivery outcomes for the citizens of Dar es Salaam.

This website is dedicated to disseminating data and results from the Dar es Salaam Mobile Phone Public Services Monitoring Survey, which provides ongoing monitoring of public service delivery in Dar es Salaam. The survey does this through biweekly phone interviews with a group of randomly-selected Dar residents, in which we ask these respondents about their views and experiences of basic public services and other aspects of public life.

This website provides open access to the data that is collected, and also provides short analyses of results from each survey round, starting  in November 2011 and continuing on a biweekly basis until March 2012. For briefings on survey results (updated every two weeks until March 2012), take a look at the “briefings” tab at the top of this page. To download data sets, click on the “data” tab.

Background

Mobile phone ownership is rapidly growing in Tanzania – especially in urban areas – which opens up new possibilities for low cost data collection and monitoring. This project, a cooperative effort of the World Bank and Twaweza, is an attempt to harness this new technology to increase citizen knowledge and awareness of public services delivery issues. The World Bank’s Tanzania country office has committed to third party monitoring of its activities in Tanzania in its 2012-2015 Country Assistance Strategy. Twaweza is a citizen-centered initiative committed to giving citizens in East Africa more and better information that they can use to monitor government activities, to speak out, to participate, and to improve their lives. Both organizations are interested in making high quality data about life in Tanzania available to citizens, researchers, government, NGOs, and other interested parties.

The project

The Dar es Salaam Mobile Phone Public Services Monitoring Project is a pilot project designed to test whether data relevant to major public services can be collected rapidly and relatively inexpensively using the new technique of high frequency mobile phone surveys. If successful, this mobile survey platform could be transferred to a wholly independent third party results monitoring entity. This organization could then collect its own outcome and output indicators, and use this to verify whether projects (from the World Bank and other donors) and basic public services (from the Tanzanian government) deliver as intended. 

The project is committed to publicly releasing all data collected. The project team is working closely together with project managers at the World Bank and well as with Twaweza to make sure that our indicators adequately reflect project objectives and commitments.