Citizens worldwide demand respect. Here’s how you can meet that need

This post is written by Tom Wein, lead of IDinsight’s dignity initiative.

• The problem: Citizens want government leaders to provide services that properly respect their dignity.

• Why it matters: Dignity is important in itself, but also linked to a range of other vital outcomes: wellbeing, empowerment, health, cooperation and democratic participation.

• The solution: Our research highlights dignity hotspots, and the practical steps government leaders can take to build pathways and cultures of dignity.

In his seventh State of the Nation address, Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta spoke of his shame: “Let me begin my report to you by discussing the ‘poverty of dignity’ visited upon our urban poor. It is, indeed, a shame that almost 60 years after independence, a majority of our urban dwellers live in a ‘dignity poor’ environment.” The data bear him out, and attest to this issue well beyond the cities: in a nationally representative 2018 survey by Twaweza, just a third of Kenyans felt their leaders put enough effort into being respectful. Such failures of government exist worldwide: speaking to the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor project in the 2000s, one Argentinian man reflected on receiving welfare: "When they give you a box of groceries they're also taming your dignity.”

"To ensure dignity is upheld, government leaders can pay attention to the hotspots, pathways, and culture of dignity in their ministries."

So if President Kenyatta were serious about addressing this, and if activists want to hold him to his promise, where should they start? How do leaders build a culture of dignity? Last year I reflected, with Dr Neela Saldanha and Dr Cait Lamberton, on putting dignity at the heart of government. Those recommendations were focused on the experiences of high-income country governments who themselves often struggle to be respectful of their citizens. But for governments with scarce resources, the challenge may be steeper. What can be done to fulfil these aspirations of respectful service delivery?

This month, we launch a new initiative at IDinsight, a research, data analytics, and advisory organisation, that is focused on upholding dignity in global development. Equitable governance is something IDinsight has thought a lot about; right now we have long-term collaborations with national and local governments in India, Malawi, Kenya, Morocco and the Philippines. We’ve also pioneered research on how to truly hear people’s preferences and priorities to inform funding decisions.

But to ensure dignity is upheld, government leaders can pay attention to the hotspots, pathways, and culture of dignity in their ministries. In doing so, they will begin to see the full humanity of their people, give them meaningful choices and a chance to consent, and reduce power asymmetries. Though we return to the example of Kenya, we believe that these lessons apply to bureaucracies across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and beyond.

Identifying hotspots

To more deeply understand which processes or areas of service delivery might be yielding disrespect, leaders can conduct ‘dignity audits’. To start with, they should pay careful attention to the interactions between their bureaucracies and citizens. Citizens will remember their face-to-face interactions as they access services far longer than any minister’s speech. Eliminating and sanctioning bigotry and favouritism of all kinds in these interactions is a first step.

That applies to all services, but the issue will be more acute when the service concerns our personal lives and identities. Disrespectful healthcare is all too frequent, and linked to worse outcomes for patients. Services that collect information about identity need to have parameters and policies in place as they are asking about and storing deeply personal information. This comes to a head most of all when faced with the carceral and coercive arms of the state: tax collectors and police forces have a special duty to act consensually. Whenever a citizen feels vulnerable, disrespect will leave a greater mark.

"By borrowing from the methods of human-centred designers, policymakers can privilege user preferences at the earliest stage of service delivery design."

In Kenya, like many countries, government services frequently break their promise of respectfulness. Long lines in the sun are common for all types of services. Civil servants can be surly. Above all, from John Michuki’s transport rules to the plastic bag ban, Kenyan leaders have made their names through crackdowns; the word itself implies the disrespect inherent in this style of law enforcement. Yet it doesn’t have to be like this. We see a potential alternative in Kenya’s 47 ‘Huduma Centres’ that allow citizens to perform 66 different electronic transactions with the state. Through glass offices, ticketed lines and physical greeters and guides, these centres were at least designed to provide a respectful experience to the 30,000 users that access them each day.

Pathways to dignified public services

So how should services be redesigned to be more respectful? The cardinal rule is that respectfulness is in the eye of the least powerful person in the room. If citizens feel that something is not yet sufficiently respectful, then that is their prerogative, whatever best practice might suggest. Our forthcoming research shows that it is valid to measure people’s ‘Felt Respect for Dignity’ through five survey questions.

To arrive at high scores on that measure, citizens must be involved from the beginning. Services should be designed with the needs and voices of citizens in the room from the start. Indeed in Kenya, public participation and feedback is mandated in the constitution. By borrowing from the methods of human-centred designers, policymakers can privilege user preferences at the earliest stage of service delivery design. If these citizens are continually consulted and have mechanisms for feedback, there will be a mechanism to evolve respectful service delivery.

Finally, civil servants looking to bring change should consider three pathways to being more respectful. These, our research suggests, recur across cultures and contexts. First, people care about recognition - feeling seen as an individual, not just a case number, by the bureaucracy, and seeing themselves in that bureaucracy. Second, agency - people want choice and a meaningful chance to consent. And third, equality - people demand that power asymmetries are minimised and that they are treated as equals.

Curating culture

So, if that’s what needs to be done, how do we get there? The scholar Jeremy Shiffman and his collaborators study how issues rise up the priority list. Adapting their framework, we can suggest four main explanations for how an issue gets prioritised in domestic politics: what the political settlement permits; what allies and advocates are calling for; what ideas and solutions are available; how all of these are resolved and enabled by ‘policy entrepreneurs’ - especially energetic, mission-driven civil servants - within government. We need to get all four right.

Our own Learning Partnerships have produced some similar lessons. In that work, we’ve learned to find those champions, stay in the room with them, create the space to build trust over time, and remain flexible to shifting needs. These changes may be lastingly encoded through the right rhetoric, measurement and incentives across the organisation. Jonathan Fox and collaborators' research reminds us that governments change when pressure comes from both top and bottom.

What next?

IDinsights’s new dignity initiative has three main components in support of all this. The first is helping the most influential actors in global development put systems in place to keep their promises to respect those they serve. The second is expanding the research agenda to keep demonstrating what works to uphold dignity and why it matters. The third component is to ensure IDinsight is an exemplary and accountable home for progressing the dignity agenda by connecting with allies and building internal processes.

Kenya’s is just one of 152 national constitutions that, echoing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, set store by the dignity of citizens. Yet faced with the first wave of covid, the Kenyan government’s first instinct was to crack down. A blanket curfew did more to control citizens than stem the virus. In that year alone, Kenya’s police killed 157 citizens. Nairobi-based feminist campaigners FEMNET saw similar failings across the continent. They launched a campaign for a #DignifiedResponse to the pandemic from their governments.

Mwanahamisi Singano explained to me that “everyone has to be accorded the highest level of respect, the highest level of support without qualifiers and that’s all I call dignity.” That is what citizens across South Asia and Sub-saharan Africa are calling for, and what their governments must endeavour to deliver. This article gives practical steps for allies of dignity in government to get started.

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