Citizen Charter in Ethiopia: The Case of Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa City Administration

Abstract

As one instrument to improve service delivery in the public sector, citizens’ charter was introduced by “New Public Management theoreticians”. In Ethiopia citizens’ charter was   implemented as one component of the civil service reform program BPR. The introduction of this charter was aiming to improve the government service delivery and to increase the satisfaction of citizens. Owing to this, the study investigates the role of citizens’ charter in enhancing citizens’ satisfaction and citizens’ participation in Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa selected government organizations. A structured questionnaire was designed and was randomly distributed to 800 respondents 400 from each city and four sectors was selected purposively based on the load of service they offer . The study employed both descriptive and inferential statistics. And it was found out that the overall satisfaction of citizens due to the introduction of citizens’ charter was low.  Similarly service actually citizens got was low as compared to their expectations and even the status of service delivery before and after the implementation of the citizens charter was not changed and even in some case it was worse. Thus, we conclude from this analysis that introducing the citizen’s charter did not brought about any improvement in service delivery and enhancing citizens satisfaction. This was because: the design and implementation of the citizens charter was not participatory, the standards set in the charter were not clear, limited awareness of both the implementers and the citizens at large and the grievance handling mechanism was very weak.

Keywords: Citizens’ charter, citizens’ satisfaction, perception, expectation

DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/12-2-01

Publication date: April 30^th 2022