Egyptians are accustomed to standing in long lines to apply for public universities, obtain national ID cards, file official paperwork or receive almost any government service. Lengthy bureaucratic measures and low salaries for government workers have created a perfect environment and fertile ground for bribery; who wouldn’t avoid the hassle if they could afford to pay a little extra? A new Ministry of State for Administrative Development initiative is hoping to change that. The plan is to reduce bribery and make government services more efficient by moving government interaction with citizens from the office space to cyber space.
“Egyptians waste a lot of their time and money wandering around the city to finish their paperwork,” says Abdo, a Cairo taxi driver. “As a taxi driver, time is money for me. It’s not acceptable to make us lose so much money and time.”
Conscious of the value of wasted time, Abdo sometimes passes the office boy some money to go to the back room and finish his paperwork quickly.
“Giving the office boy LE 20 to finish my stuff is better than wasting three or four hours standing in line just to find out at the end that I’m missing a document and have to come back the next day,” Abdo explains.
Although e-government services already exist here, many like Abdo do not use them because they either do not know about them or do not have access to the internet. The government hopes to change that by making the services accessible via SMS and mobile phone technology.
Egypt ranked 105 out of 179 countries in the Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2007. The index measures perceptions of corruption as seen by the business community and country analysts, and ranges between 10, (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt). Egypt scored 2.9 — a drop from 2006 when the country was ranked number 70 and scored 3.3 — indicating that people perceive corruption has worsened.
However, in the same year, 2007, the World Bank named Egypt the world’s top reformer based on changes the government made to reduce the bureaucratic process. The two contradictory statistics indicate that the legislative, economic and technological reforms and developments that took place and resulted in Egypt being named the world’s top reformer went unnoticed by those surveyed and therefore were not reflected in the Transparency International report.
While technology is dramatically altering every aspect of our life, our idea of the government hasn’t really changed for decades. Long lines, empty desks, and lengthy, tiring procedures are still defining traits of the government in the minds of many like Abdo.
The Ministry of State for Administrative Development (MSAD), led by the father of Egypt’s e-government, Minister Ahmed Darwish, is working hard to lessen face-to-face interaction between citizens and government workers by employing technology to provide government services online. The e-government services aim to minimize interaction between the government and the citizen to combat bribery, increase cost-effectiveness and make it generally easier for the public to deal with the government.
“Traditionally, a person who wanted to obtain a government service, would have to leave his home and stand in line to get his work done,” says Darwish. “Now technology enables us to deliver the service in new, different and more convenient ways.”
For some time now, Egyptians with access to the internet have been able to pay their traffic fines, obtain a birth certificate or national ID, and apply for admission to universities from their computers without having to deal with the hassle of governmental bureaucracy or leaving their homes.
There are more than 80 government services offered through the Egyptian Government Portal (www.egypt.gov.eg). The portal includes three main categories — services for citizens, the business community, and foreigners. Some of the content is in both Arabic and English, but most services are only available in Arabic, including those for foreigners.
Roadblocks
Abdo is 46 years old and has never used a computer before. He knows about the e-government from newspapers, but computers and the internet still remain a puzzle for him.
“This is a service for the rich who have computers and use the internet. What about the poor people? They don’t know how to use the internet or deal with technology,” Abdo says.
As of March 2008, 9.17 million, or around 12% of Egypt’s population, had access to the internet, according to Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, which leaves most of the population without easy access to the e-government services.
“The main problem is that most people do not own a computer,” says Amr Abdallah, Vodafone Egypt’s Chief Strategy Officer. “There are only 2 million computers in Egypt, and this is a great obstacle, because no matter what you say about the e-government, people after all won’t be able to access the services if they don’t have a computer that is connected to the internet.”
However, Darwish and his team are aware that they live in a country where the majority of people don’t have access to the internet, and if they do, chances are they won’t know how to use the service.
“Do people have to use the internet to be able to get the service? The answer is no. That’s not how we think and we know this is Egypt, not some other country,” says Darwish.
Darwish is working on diversifying the channels through which the public can access the services to encourage more people to use e-government. Other channels that don’t require computer literacy include kiosks with computers and attendants to help people navigate services and a call center, which serves people over the phone.
Darwish also thinks that the services need more publicity because even those who have internet may not be aware it exist. “We started thinking if we should take part of our resources and spend it on advertising, or should we spend the money on trying to increase the number of services and develop them, and instead find a sponsor to spend on publicity,” he says. “We put the publicity issue out to tender and Vodafone Egypt won the bid. We want our new sponsor and the civil society to help us with publicizing the service, so we can only focus on improving our portal and services.” Vodafone is both handling the publicity and technical development for the project.
Going Mobile
The number of mobile phone owners is four times the number of internet users in Egypt. Therefore, accessing the services through mobile phones could help more of the non-internet users to benefit from the services offered by electronic means.
MSAD and Vodafone Egypt, who paid LE 9.5 million to sponsor Egypt’s Government Services Portal, are developing a mobile phone delivery channel for government services. Like e-government, m-government is trying to provide the citizen with an efficient and reliable service. Vodafone Egypt and MSAD have the mobile gateway and the infrastructure is already there ready to support the m-government services.
“The services provided by SMS will expand our reach to people who may not be able to own a computer, but have a basic mobile phone,” says Sameh Bedier, the head of policies and programs sector at MSAD.
“It will help expand the reach of e-government services into rural areas for those who don’t have a fixed internet connection,” says Mohammed Al-Ayouti, Vodafone Egypt’s senior manager of internet propositions.
According to Al-Ayouti, bringing services to the digital space makes it more convenient for the citizen, and adding the mobile aspect to it puts the service at their fingertips anytime and anywhere.
Bedier says the first services offered are going to be simple ones like train and opera tickets. Some of the services can be accessed by SMS, which can be done by any mobile phone. Other services might require the mobile phone to support GPRS or 3G. Users will pay to access the m-government services with their phone credit.
In MSAD m-government doesn’t only stand for mobile government, but also “more channels government,” says Bedier. Those who can’t read and write or can’t use the internet can still access the e-government services by calling the government call center or visiting one of the electronic kiosks. There are 550 electronic kiosks operating around the country, mostly concentrated in rural areas. The kiosks each have a computer connected to the internet and an employee to assist the user.
“Not every service can be available on mobile phones. It is hard to have a service like applying for universities on the mobile, but after applying online, the student can be notified of the result on his mobile by a text message. So a mobile can be a channel by itself for some services, or integrate with other channels to provide a certain service,” says Bedeir.
According to Darwish, there are two kinds of bribery, but only one the e-government can end. “The universal definition of a bribe is to give money or a gift to persuade someone to give you something that is not your right and you shouldn’t be having,” explains Darwish. “In Egypt most bribery is to persuade someone to do something that is your right and e-government will be able to stop that kind of bribery.”
Just as most people now cannot imagine living without a mobile phone, the government hopes to make e-government and m-government services an essential part of everday life. Darwish’s vision is to make people like Abdo and tens of millions of other Egyptians forget by 2013 how tough it was to get government services without the use of technology.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Osama Diab
Quelle/Source: Business Today Egypt, 15.03.2009
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