Hello everyone, my name is Jaime and I have been working with ICMA-Latin America (ICMA-LA) since 2002. Currently I am the Operations Director.

ICMA-LA has been working in Latin America since the early 1990s helping local municipalities to strengthen  institutional capacities, to measure their effectiveness and efficiency, to share public information with their citizens and to foster citizen’s participation. ICMA-LA also promotes the Municipal Administrator position, as a way to professionalize public administration in local government.

One of the ICMA-LA´s programs in the region is the SINDES Program (SINDES stands in Spanish for Performance Indicators System), which is under my responsibility. SINDES was created ten years ago as a vehicle to promote performance measurement. It has been the Program goal to serve as foundation for participating municipal governments to develop their own measurement system.

Implementing measurement systems (MS) into the government is not an easy task. Officials look at this tool almost as an “enemy” instead of a “friend”. The reason is because MS reveals how well or poor a person or a department is performing. It also makes more accountable the whole organization.

Since its conception, SINDES has been an active player promoting MS in Mexico and more than 55 municipalities have been involved in the program. Annually, 10 to 15 municipalities are “active participants”.

Every six months SINDES releases a report to the public. This issue presents the results of 78 performance indicators related to the 1st and 2nd half of 2010. The report has been useful to academia, media, public bodies and society in general because it relies on the comparison of performance beyond traditional concepts of actions or expenditure or money invested in public works and programs, a fact that has distorted the appropriate monitoring of government performance in Mexico.

For this year’s report, there were 14 Mexican municipalities which voluntarily contributed data to generate results; Atizapán de Zaragoza (Edo. Méx.), Badiraguato (Sin.), Chihuahua (Chih.), Guadalajara (Jal.), Guasave (Sin.), Guaymas (Son.), Hermosillo (Son.), Mocorito (Sin.), Navolato (Sin.), Nogales (Son.), Puebla (Pue.), Salvador Alvarado (Sin.), San Nicolás de los Garza (N.L.) y San Pedro Garza García (N.L.).

The results of the 1st half of 2010 were based on the date provided by eight municipalities, while for the 2nd half eleven municipality were involved.

SINDES 78 indicators, having biannual and annual frequency, are distributed in nine key areas of local government: General condition, Government and Administration, Legal Framework, Public Services, Public Finance, Planning, Public Safety, Public Policy Development and Infrastructure.

A sample of the report results are:

Note: Results in currency are in Mexican pesos. Exchange rate; US$ 1.00 = $12.00 pesos.

To download the full report 2010 (in Spanish) press here and to download previous reports 2001-2009 (in Spanish) and for further information I invite you to visit www.sindes.org

Mexican municipal governments are invited to participate in SINDES anytime in the year, and contribute to greater transparency and compliance with the provisions of law to generate valuable information, useful for decision-making.

Before I go I want to share with you a couple of experiences with SINDES Program. I remember when a Mayor called years ago and told us that, being part of SINDES, he could not see any kind of benefits to his municipality. Then we asked him “Mayor did you use the indicators results in any way?” He answered, “No, the report has been just right here over my desk since I received it”. We quickly replied “Mayor, the report does not take decisions, you do”. 

Other experience occurred last year when the Municipality of Puebla won a national award in a public administration contest, which is organized by a very well-known university (CIDE), thanks to its MS whose name is SEDEM (Municipal Performance Evaluation System). SEDEM was developed in part thanks to SINDES back in 2005. One lesson learned confirmed was that leadership, perseverance and political support are key elements for a MS to succeed.  SINDES Program team was very proud of Puebla´s achievement. To download the SEDEM presentation (in Spanish) that was explained to the jury press here

Finally, I want to tell you that SINDES Program can be adapted to any country. If you want a SINDES presentation in English just let me know at jvillasana@icma.org I will be happy to share it. See you next time.