For over four years now, SEMA has partnered with the Justice Law and Order Sector -JLOS, to provide client feedback tools to the police stations and with the aid of our trained data collectors who are able to identify precisely how clients feel about the services received at the different stations. SEMA has also deployed devices at these stations to allow citizens to rate the services on a five scale rating model that highlights key emotion points from very bad to very good. SEMA has rolled out this system to 15 police stations including CPS in Gulu, Jinja, and Mbarara and at 7 KCCA divisional offices located in Rubaga, Nakawa, Central, Kawempe and Makindye.
On the morning of 25th February 2022, SEMA, together with the Police had a sit-down engagement where discussed, was the monthly January Report, a systematic analysis of citizen feedback trends over a 4 months period. Since May 2021, SEMA has collected feedback from 9422 citizens across 15 stations, allowing for SEMA to convert this data to 89 individual feedback reports that have been customized to various stations where the SEMA feedback system is functional.
Our Country Director, Lydia Matte, took the lead in this discussion explaining the setup of the monthly reports and how data is explained within the reports. Discussions were covered over graphs and percentage figures that have been analyzed by the SEMA data team. This allowed the force representatives at the meeting to have a visual reference to how this data works and what the feedback from citizens means to certain variables such as waiting times vis a vis satisfaction rates for the citizens, these graphs showed a direct relation to how these two variables worked, for instance, they explained how a decrease in waiting times at stations to an average of 30 minutes, inversely showed an increase in the satisfaction rates at an average of 70%, and the reverse is true.
The data further showed exactly how many respondents each of the stations recorded within the time frame identified for data collection. It showed that 64 percent of the respondents received at these police stations were male and 36 percent were female. The data went as far as highlighting how many respondents visited each department of the institution.
Discussed too was how SEMA monitors feedback through the metrics used to measure satisfaction ratings, these are in the form of Survey questions that our trainees share with the citizen, questions like “Were you helped?” “Was the service delivery process completed?” “Were you sent from office to office?”, among many more that help collect as much qualitative and quantitative data as possible to come up with the trend report.
You will be glad to hear that progressive changes do come from your feedback. The stakeholders, in this case, did listen and pay considerable attention to these 5 recommendations made by the citizen feedback data off the trend report and are very eager to show results through implementation. These were your recommendations:
- Police to be more friendly and polite to citizens while providing the services
- Public sensitization on police standards to avoid issues of being sent around police stations
- Highly rated departments should be recognized and given incentives within individual stations to encourage good provision of services.
- Department leaders should be empowered to tackle absenteeism, corruption and customer care within their departments to be able to offer improved services to clients.
- Offer customer care sessions to officers at different levels and divisions.
SEMA is very delighted to see what impact our data actually has on the operations of these service institutions. The reports and data generate a much sought after basis to explain and check departmental performances to help the institution set operational and service delivery goals and standards.
The discussion didn’t end there, as we finalised the meeting with our honoured guest SSP Nuwagaba Ema, who explained that in the 3-year relationship between the Police in the Directorate of Research and planning and SEMA, they have received action points because of these reports; that better show how best to change working behaviours and the simple key that can be done to get best results taking the 20-80 rule into consideration.
Through the SEMA feedback system, we have worked with the police who have been able to plan, reassess, or realign their procedure to meet the public needs.
The engagement was concluded with notes on SEMA’s work based on factual and guided findings. We look forward to discussing the reports extensively in the future and great thanks go out to the men and women in uniform in service to the nation.
Christine Ekakoro
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