CHAPTER THREE: DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL GOVERNANCE _____________________________________________________________________ Box no. 3.7: An example of administrative innovation Area Administrative innovation Construction of a governmental intranet The government has initiated the establishment of a governmental intranet covering 45 provinces in order to equip the administration with a modern, infrastructural broadband that can meet its current and future communication needs and allow ICT to be used for improving and diversifying its presentations. To date, any site in the administration located within a 15km radius in the city of Ouagadougou (including schools, colleges and high schools, health centres, police stations, etc.) may henceforth connect on demand to this intranet by means of a very high-speed wireless connection, thereby having access to the internet or to shared applications and to telephone services of the administration. 278. Despite the efforts and progress made, administrative governance still suffers from a lack of efficiency according to stakeholders in the field. The RGAP is an ambitious programme and its strategies are coherent and relevant. However, implementation thereof is still in its initial stages and is fragmented. It needs more time to develop to its full potential and so bear fruit. Obviously, it does not yet have the means to match its ambitions, since it is adversely affected by a shortage of human, material and financial resources. Public administration is being undermined by the lack of logistics and information technology, especially in terms of the SIGASPE, which is designed, among other things, to provide support for decentralisation. 279. Local authorities do not function efficiently as administrations, because the level of participation by people in public affairs is only moderate. The increase in the volume of business does not adapt easily to the inadequacy of resources of all kinds, such as a low level of financial resources, infrastructural underequipment and scarcity of quality human resources. Local Burkina Faso people are faced with many problems that, according to those interviewed by the CRM, constitute obstacles to the implementation of the decentralisation policy and to the improvement of the quality of services rendered to citizens. 280. Deconcentration is still embryonic and suffers from the difficulty of defining positions. As a result, one finds generally very terse letters of mission and a frequent lack of procedure manuals. For example, the prefect is struggling to find a place in the new territorial division resulting from decentralisation. 281. The compartmentalisation of state structures is another weakness of the government of Burkina Faso. The result is that it is sometimes difficult to 131