Majority of local units are operating with just one or two information technology-related staff and they too have only bare minimum qualifications and this has hit service delivery, a government report said.

Hardly any IT-based services other than digitised vital registrations—birth, marriage, divorce, death and migration—are being provided at the local units, according to the ‘Evaluation Report about the Capacity of the Local Governments on Information Technology’ released by the Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration on Sunday.

The report was prepared based on the details made available by 434 local units across the country. The ministry had asked the local units to provide details of the status of human resources related to information technology (IT), related infrastructure, institutional capacity of the local levels in the areas IT, status of the use of IT for service delivery, the status of website management, status of digital literacy and status of policy formulation on IT.

Of the total 434 local units evaluated, 392 (90.32 percent) had just one or two IT staff, while 2.3 percent don’t have IT staff while local units with more than one IT staff including an IT engineer is 7.35 percent.

“We have been providing budgetary support to hire one IT officer per local unit on a contract basis,” said Gopi Krishna Khanal, national programme director at the Provincial and Local Governance Support Programme under the federal affairs ministry.

“Majority of local governments have IT staff but some local governments have not shown interest to hire such staff even though we have offered financial support.”

The Provincial and Local Governance Support Programme aims to provide local units policy support and help them with institution building and capacity building.

“We have provided financial support for hiring one IT officer each at local unit headquarters, but such staffers are needed at all wards, not just headquarters for better service delivery,” said Khanal.

Another official at the Provincial and Local Government Service Programme, requesting anonymity, said hardly any ward of the 753 local units has IT staff. And still just around 690 local units have hired IT officers and the rest of the local units are doing without, the official said.

When it comes to their qualifications, 84.1 percent of the local governments have staff with bare minimum qualifications while such staff at 1.38 percent of local governments do not have even the minimum qualifications needed for the job. Only 14.52 percent local governments have IT staffers with at least a master’s degree in the related field, according to the report.

The majority of the IT staff (65.44 percent) have not received any training on IT in the last two years. None of the IT staff in 84.56 percent of the local governments included in the report have received ‘in-service’ training.

There are still a significant number of local units whose staff still don’t know how to run office packages on the computer. According to the report, there are still 31 local units (7.14 percent) whose less than 25 percent staff can operate office packages on the computer.

Besides limited and underqualified human resources, the report pointed out the poor IT infrastructure as the reason for the non-existent or poor delivery of IT-related services at the local units.

The local governments have long been complaining about the lack of adequate technical human resources and necessary infrastructure which they say have affected service delivery.

As per the report, the number of local governments having access to electricity in all their ward offices is 81.57 percent while 29 local units have no electricity in all of their wards.

“This suggests the lack of infrastructure has hindered efforts at making local governments IT-friendly,” the report pointed out.

As many as 24.65 percent local units don’t have access to solar-based power backup in none of their ward offices. Even though the percentage of local units with internet access in all their ward offices stands at 73.96, there are still 24 local governments (5.53 percent) which have no access to internet in any of their wards.

Even access to mobile phones has not reached 30 percent of households in 2.53 percent of local units. “This has weakened the demands for IT-based services,” the report says. “So, it is necessary to expand IT infrastructure to rural areas and create awareness on information technology.”

Amid the inadequacy of human resources and infrastructure, only 10.14 percent of the local units have fully used office automation systems and only 5.53 percent local governments have installed electronic-building permission systems. But, a majority of the local governments use e-bidding for public procurement with 67.97 percent of them using the e-bidding system fully.

Likewise, just 22.12 percent of the local governments have an online tax payment system.

“Even though the number of IT staff is low at the local level, they have been instrumental in installing systems to enable IT-related services,” said Khanal.