Governments worldwide are heavily investing in the digitalization of all public administration processes. Digitalization helps to transform traditional bureaucracy into customer-oriented paperless services, making it more transparent, accountable and effective. Eurasian countries are keeping up with these global trends and often, are even innovators in building a digital state. How Eurasian countries develop e-governments, what challenges they face and what is the future of classical public administration in the digital world. These issues were discussed at StrategEast.Live panel discussion “E-governance in Eurasia”.
Opening the discussion, Hannes Astok, Executive Director and Chairman of the Management Board, e-Governance Academy (Estonia), focused his speech on such aspects of digitalization as anticorruption, transparency and governance efficiency: “Talking about digital governance, I’d like to underline that it is a great tool for anticorruption efforts, it is a great tool for transparency, and also a great tool for governance efficiency and citizen efficiency. In Estonia, almost 99% of public services are available online. There still are a couple of services not available online (like marriage/divorce and buying/selling property), which is done not for technical reasons, but to protect people from emotional decisions. Throughout the last 20 years, we in Estonia understood that developing digital government is not only a technical exercise, but also changing rules and regulations around it, and making it understandable for citizens.” Mr. Astok also mentioned the importance of secure data exchange and strong digital identity on the way to digitizing government services and praised Ukraine’s efforts in building digital governance services.
According to Mstyslav Banik, Head of the Development of e-Services, Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the country is working on making all public services available online. “First, we started with presenting the Diia (Action) brand to gain trust and support of the citizens to digital public services. Today we have Diia portal and application with over 14 million users, which is a one-stop-shop with over 74 public services available online, with fastest entrepreneur registration, various kinds of government support to businesses and their employees. We introduces the first fully digital ID in the world,” Mr. Banik shared some success cases and added that Ukraine aims at creating the most convenient and user-friendly country in the world.
In his turn, Daniel Medimorec, Senior Expert for International Relations in the Directorate for Digitalization and E-Government, Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs of Austria welcomed Ukraine as a frontrunner in what Austria is working on and shared his experience in e-government development: “Digitalization is the main engine of resilience and growth, especially amid Covid crisis. In Austria, we are focused on reducing the digital divide and development of new e-governance solutions such as m-governance (mobile governance). It is a top priority for the last couple of years. Thus, we have introduced digital office mobile application which gives access to various public services.”
Kyrgyzstan is also taking steps in turning public services online, told Azamat Burzhuev, Head of the Digital Transformation Department, Administration of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic. “In introducing public services online, technology is only 10% of the problem, while the main part is proper legislation and understanding of the processes by people. I am often asked by journalists and other people: when the digitalization will finish? I keep telling that this process is very complicated and in fact, infinite, switch to digital will never completely stop. Anyway, we are doing our best to implement public services online. In particular, we’ve introduced Tunduk portal and application on e-public services, similar to a Ukrainian one.” Mr Burzhuev added, that due to Covid pandemic, the Kyrgyz citizens have realized how important digitalization is, people were forced to stay at home and realized that the digital services that the government has been developing for a long time are indeed very important.
Answering the question by the panel moderator, Danylo Molchanov, Chief of Party, Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services Project on how the countries utilize digital opportunities amid Covid pandemic, Mr Medimorec shared Austria’s strategy of investing in digitalization in a number of spheres including in the digital skills sector and cybersecurity which begins being more of an issue.