Mexico City’s Government has always have indicators. In it’s early stages these were focused, mainly, in financial themes, in the activities required to produce and on the public goods or services: the predominant focus of those times was to inform the public how many square meters of pavement were applied, how many hospitals were being built, how many policemen patrolled the streets.
Without a doubt this type of information is very important, but incomplete in order to measure areas linked to the changes that public policies generate in the population. For this reason, since 2008, as a first step, we seek to expand our measurement to areas like how much has the expectancy of life in our population increased, or how much has the level of insecurity in the city decreased; how has our school drop-out rate evolved in all levels. |
Since public resources are scarce, the extension can’t be capricious; it needs a conductive thread to design only the necessary indicators according to certain desirable criteria: availability, simplicity, validity, specificity, trustworthiness. This thread is at the start, a clear definition of the objectives, both of public policy and public programs. We can find these definitions in the General Development Program of the City, the main planning instrument, and in the programs derived from it.
Among the programs that stem from the General Development Program, we find two types worth mentioning: those who constitute the gender policy and those related to human rights. These differ from other public policies by being transversal: they have to be considered at the moment of designing, executing, evaluating and constructing indicators for any public policy. In short, given the previous statement, we can classify the indicators in general, by gender and by human rights.
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