Case Centre resources

In April 2021, Colombian President Ivan Duque’s administration put forward an urgently needed tax-reform package known as the ‘Sustainable Solidarity Bill’. Aiming to raise state revenues, the bill also targeted key areas of weakness in the taxation system: its complexity, inefficiency, and low redistribution. The bill was widely hailed by tax experts as being fair and technically sound. 

However, before it could be debated in Congress, the bill triggered widespread protests and public criticism, drawing on a general mood of disenchantment with government. Opponents saw the bill as targeting Colombia’s middle class, which was already struggling in light of the pandemic. Of particular concern was the bill’s proposed reform of the country’s VAT regime, notably the removal of VAT exclusions and exemptions from many goods and services, including some in the ‘basic family basket’. While poorer Colombians would receive compensation for their VAT payments, middle-class households would not. 

The government had to withdraw the bill, and the finance minister resigned. The case study picks up the story in May 2021, when the responsibility of redrafting the taxation reform fell on José Manuel Restrepo, Colombia’s new finance minister. How could he meet the bill’s revenue and fairness objectives whilst placating the middle-class?

In late 2021, India’s secretary of school education and literacy, Anita Karwal, needed to decide whether to continue to invest in DIKSHA, India’s government-owned, free-to-use education technology, in the coming fiscal year. DIKSHA, which had been developed in 2017 in partnership with two not-for-profits, was originally designed for teacher training and had low uptake in its first years. Yet over time DIKSHA gained new capabilities, transforming it into an increasingly popular direct-to-student learning platform. Then in 2020, during pandemic-related school closures, DIKSHA witnessed an exponential growth in usage.

By late 2021, DIKSHA had seen billions of individual ‘learning sessions’, and many teachers responded positively about the platform and its educational uses. However, high adoption was not matched by high impact in India’s most underserved communities, not least because connecting to DIKSHA required internet access, which a 2021 survey suggested that a quarter of Indian students did not have. Now, with budgets tightening, Karwal had to decide whether to continue to bet scarce resources on DIKSHA or whether there were better uses of the limited public budget to be found.

In 2015, the Ethiopian government signed the Seqota Declaration, a high-level political commitment to end stunting in Ethiopian children under two by 2030. The country’s existing nutrition programme was failing to deliver on promises of collaboration across the various federal ministries and local-government levels involved and, as a result, the different sectors were sometimes even working at cross purposes.

The implementation of the Seqota Declaration was intended to address this lack of collaboration and be multisectoral, although the Programme Delivery Unit was housed at the Ministry of Health and several other sectors believed Health was continuing to dominate the nutrition landscape. Then, just a year into the 15-year programme, one senior minister stopped attending the fortnightly meetings. With limited resources available for implementing the declaration and with the different sectors having many issues vying for their time, this case study asks students to consider how to ensure political buy-in for this supposedly multisectoral endeavour.