Documentation Base Note, Part 1: Organizing the Content for the Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Communications, Final Version

The note is the first part of a pair of reports from a mission that ran from December 2015 to July 2016 under the supervision of the Director of Public Works, Alfred Piard. A preamble shared with the monitoring and evaluation report explains that no formal agreement on sectoral dialogue among the institutions could be reached in the first months of 2016, and that tools for managing information cannot by themselves settle structural questions about who does what in the urban sector.

The work had two stages. From January to April 2016 the consultant interviewed the bodies that hold urban data (the national statistics institute IHSI, the geospatial center CNIGS, the technical secretariat of the CIAT, the ministries of planning, public works and the interior, DINEPA, the housing unit UCLBP, UN agencies and others) and made an inventory of documents, finding no complete listing or directory. From May to June a working group of five staff of the Urban Planning Service and the Building Technical Bureau met four times to define needs. A draft was presented on October 7, 2016, and meetings on November 9 and 10 settled the specifications and the 2017 action plan.

The note proposes a base attached to the Urban Planning Service but covering the whole Directorate, with a portal linked to the ministry's web site. The installation phase in the first half of 2017 would rely on three people (a service manager, an IT manager and a coordinator) and the development phase in the second half would bring in partner institutions on a basis of reciprocity. Paper documents would be kept to a minimum. The conclusion says the main risk is a base known and used only by the Directorate itself, and the annexes in part 2 supply the inventory, a draft specification and the action plan.