An interactive dashboard to monitor Jamaica’s Vision 2030 National Plan

May 1st, 2015

by Guest blogger, Mariana Leytón

With a clear vision of the importance of sharing development and progress information, the Jamaican government created a Dashboard of Indicators that visualizes the progress made on each national outcome established in the National Development Plan “Vision 2030 Jamaica”. The plan (the country’s first long-term strategic plan, which can be accessed on the PIOJ’s website), emerged in a context in which Jamaica’s leaders and citizens recognized that though progress had been made in the island since its independence, many internal and external challenges remained that could hinder the progress of the country. Understanding that previous planning efforts had limited success due to—among various factors—lack of monitoring and evaluating specific progress indicators and limited involvement of non-state actors, this plan is based on a results-based framework with four national goals and fifteen national outcomes.

The Vision that this national plan pursues is: “Jamaica, the place of choice to live, work, raise families, and do business.”

Each National Development Goal contains a set of strategic outcomes to focus efforts on education, health, security, governance, economic development, the environment and overall well-being. These are linked to forty-six results indicators that allow all stakeholders (ministries, departments and agencies of Government, civil society bodies, the private sector, trade unions, international development partners, and all Jamaican citizens) to monitor progress over the short, medium and long term. These indicators have targets set for 2012, 2015 and 2030 and are reviewed every three years.

In 2013, the Vision 2030 Jamaica National Secretariat, in collaboration with the JamStats Unit, and UNICEF Jamaica, with technical consultancy services from the UN DevInfo Support Group, completed the development of an online interactive graphical e-Dashboard to monitor the progress of implementation of Vision 2030 Jamaica and to facilitate collaboration and control among stakeholders. The Dashboard uses DevInfo, a database system for monitoring human development endorsed by the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) to assist countries in monitoring achievement of the Millenium Development Goals. It’s a tool for “organizing, storing and presenting data in a uniform way to facilitate data sharing at the country level across government departments, UN agencies and development partners.” It supports open access and widespread data exchange.

The progress of each indicator interactively, and to view strategy documents, progress reports, and explore development data. The visualization makes it easy to compare each indicator against its target. In this way, the user can easily see if the indicator is Green (on track, achieved or surpassed the target), Yellow (off track, there has been improvement but the target hasn’t been made), or Red (off track, no improvement or worsening from baseline).

Data for the dashboard comes from a range of sources, including government agencies and international organizations. These include, on a national level, the Statistical Institute of Jamaica  (STATIN); the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ); the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office (JIPO); the Jamaica Bauxite Institute (JBI); the Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC); the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB); the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA); the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF); as well as various government Ministries: Education (MOE); National Security (MNS), Justice (MOJ); Finance and Planning (MOFP); Science, Technology, Energy and Mining (MSTEM). On an international level, data is also collected from the Global Economic Forum (GEF), UNDP, the World Bank, EconStats and Yale University.

The Dashboard is currently being upgraded and updated, again with funding assistance from UNICEF, specifically to update the indicator framework with the most recent data up to 2013 and 2014; update the comparison of performance against targets with the traffic light signals using the most recent data; provide a quick filtering option to filter by indicator status; improvements to its graphical displays and webpage graphics; enable the export of indicator data by Outcome and Goal into a PDF profile and Excel spreadsheets; and carry out aesthetic changes to the interface.  These steps will enhance the ability of stakeholders to assess progress against the national framework of indicators and targets and align their plans, programmes, projects and budgets with the goals, outcomes, strategies and actions of Vision 2030 Jamaica. The upgrading project is expected to be completed by mid-2015.

You can visit the Dashboard to visualize the progress on all indicators and you can follow news on the National Development Plan on Twitter and Facebook.

This post was originally published YoGobierno.org

Tags: Caribbean development, developing the Caribbean, DevInfo, Jamaica, Jamaica National Secretariat, JamStats Unit, National Development Plan, UNICEF Jamaica, Vision 2030 Jamaica