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VIRTUAL REALITY
Three years since the launch of the e-government portal, more than
two dozen government agencies offering services and information
are available online, obviating the need to stand in long queues
at ministries and state agencies. Sameh Bedair, director of policies
and program sectors at the Ministry of State for Administrative
Development, understands the public’s skepticism, but is confident
that once citizens discover how easy it has become to renew a driver’s
license, request official documents or pay a telephone bill over
the Internet, they will never go back to standing in line.
BY REHAB EL-BAKRY
It was 1999. Computers still came with floppy drives, laptops were
as rare as snow and a 49K dial-up was a fast connection for those
who even knew what the Internet was. So when the newly formed Ministry
of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT) announced
during a press conference that it aimed to make government services
available online within five years, the handful of journalists who
understood the concept of e-government broke out in fits of laughter.
After all, Egypt was still in the technological Stone Age. The decision
to create a ministerial portfolio for IT a year earlier was in a
large part due to the obvious and growing technology gap between
Egypt and developed nations. It seemed an enormous leap just to
equip government offices with computers and train their ossified
staff to use them – let alone coordinate with other agencies
to process online documents. Expecting the public to believe government
workers would actually embrace these changes seemed beyond reason.
“So they laughed and they were skeptical and they had every
right to be,” he says. “But in the end we proved them
wrong.”
Sameh Bedair, at that time working as a communications guru in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, knew the e-government project would
face formidable challenges, both in terms of infrastructure and
bureaucracy. He also knew people would never believe it until they
saw it with their own eyes. “For one thing, they lacked information
about e-government and technology in general. There was also an
absence of trust between the public and the government.”
Bedair was part of a core group of IT professionals supporting the
ministerial team in the planning of its Information Society (IS),
a five-pillar initiative to increase Internet penetration, develop
robust communications and IT infrastructure, expand the role of
ICT in key industries, create a strong and independent regulatory
environment, and establish an e-government network. “In 2000,
MCIT started to create work groups for the various initiatives and
e-government was one of them. I joined this group and we worked
on drafting four e-government documents concerning standards and
document classification; messaging and networking; interoperability;
and security,” he says.
Bedair completed a degree in electronic and communications engineering
at Cairo University in the 1970s. By the time he returned to complete
his Master’s in computer engineering in the mid-1990s, he
had two decades of practical experience under his belt, having worked
on building a secure communications network for the diplomatic corps
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He joined MCIT full-time in 2002 as project manager for the ministry’s
e-government program, moving to the Ministry of State for Administrative
Development (MSAD) when the program was transferred there in late
2004. The move made sense, he argues, as MSAD’s primary function
is to facilitate the skills-development of Egypt’s government
employees. As bureaucracy lay beneath mountains of paperwork, Bedair
reckoned the most effective solution would lie in reducing the paper
trail.
End of the line
A study conducted by Suez Canal University prior to the launch
of the e-government project found that the average Egyptian spends
three weeks in queues at government agencies each year, and has
to visit these agencies an average of 3.5 times just to obtain the
requested service. The e-government project aimed to create a virtual
replica of all government agencies that allows citizens using the
Internet to access information, complete any necessary documents
and request services without ever setting foot in a government office.
By putting many of these services online, and by making the process
more transparent, the e-government team hoped to reduce the average
number of visits to 1.5, slashing 900,000 wasted work hours.
But when MCIT’s e-government team began examining how to apply
this in Egypt, it became apparent that in many ways they would be
starting from scratch. “We analyzed the challenges and they
were many; the biggest of which was the infrastructure. We knew
that we couldn’t have real e-government applications until
the technical and legal infrastructures were ready,” he says.
“At the time we were planning the project, the physical infrastructure
was still weak. There was very limited penetration of computers
and the number of people who had access to the Internet was limited.
There were also other issues such as having a legal framework within
which e-government applications could be formed and applied, which
we needed to create. There were other laws that had to be amended
in order to reflect the presence and the recognition of e-government
as [an interface] for the public to interact with government.”
MCIT was working on a parallel track to increase Internet penetration,
which would reduce the structural costs of e-government, while amplifying
its benefits. Several government initiatives aimed at increasing
the number of Internet subscribers, including the Free Internet
model, launched in early 2002, and state-run IT clubs, which now
number over 1,200. “The Free Internet model was very important
because it cut the cost of accessing the Internet and allowed more
people to be online,” Bedair explains. “The IT clubs,
which were spread out throughout the country, allowed people who
couldn’t afford computers of their own to access the Internet.”
Tougher battles were being fought closer to home. Egypt’s
5-million-strong government workforce needed to be brought online
– a monumental challenge given that many had never used a
computer. Many viewed technology with suspicion. “We were
dealing with a government culture that had no relationship with
information technology at all,” he says. “The basics
were missing. There were no computers in most government offices;
everything was still done on paper. People were very skeptical and
resistant to what we were saying. This also took a lot of work,
especially convincing people within the government that automation
using computers, the Internet and e-government would not threaten
their job [security]. Their jobs might change a little, but they
were not threatened.”
On the legal front, there were also many challenges. Bedair explains
that everything – from how information is processed using
e-government, to the recognition of electronically circulated documents
as official, to the willingness of government agencies to share
information with one another – needed a legal framework. New
legislation, such as the e-signature law of 2004, was passed to
support e-government services. “The e-signature law... was
one of the laws introduced to make e-mails and [digital] documents
official,” he says. “It made them as official and legally
valid as [paper documents signed by hand].”
Creating a framework
From 2002 till 2004, Bedair’s team focused on developing
the infrastructure for e-government. MCIT commissioned local and
international IT firms to help create the back office support for
the project. “All the work within the e-government project
was implemented by Egyptian IT companies supported in partnership
with multinationals,” he says. “Multinationals such
as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle offered the e-government [project]
solutions, while the implementation and the writing of the applications
was done by their domestic partners.”
The Egyptian Government Service Portal, the e-government web portal,
launched in 2004 with four services, giving citizens the opportunity
to check and pay telephone bills online; request copies of their
birth certificate; check their electricity bill; and view the traffic
violations levied against their motor vehicle. But if it were to
be successful, the project would need a strong selling point. “We
knew that in order for us to really be able to illustrate to the
public the value of e-government and convince them to use it, we
needed to offer a service that would make a big splash [and] that
people [dreaded],” says Bedair, “Renewing car registration
was an obvious one.”
It had all the right ingredients: long queues, stifling bureaucracy
and palms in need of greasing. What better way to showcase how e-government
could improve transparency and efficiency, while reducing tiresome
waits.
The e-government team approached various governorates to implement
the first phase. Cairo and Alexandria governorate officials were
hesitant, but Giza Governorate officials found the possibility of
reducing the pressure at the vehicle registration offices simply
too tempting. “They jumped at the idea and they worked with
us to make the processes work,” Bedair recalls.
But the project also required ministries and government agencies
to commit to working together and agree to accept each others’
digital documents. Without their cooperation, the project would
fail. “We needed [various ministries] to cooperate, because
vehicle registration is with the Ministry of Interior, while traffic
violations are with the Ministry of Justice, so a lot of joint work
had to be done.”
Initial response to the online car registration service was slow,
but as a few intrepid citizens tried it, word soon spread that it
worked as advertised and its popularity soared. As lines at Giza
car registration offices began to recede, authorities in other governorates
began taking notice. “The entire project was so successful
that several other governorates were eager to implement it as well
as other e-government projects,” says Bedair. “Don’t
forget, just like people are resistant to change, so are government
bodies. We needed to have one very successful launch under our belts
in order to begin to change people’s minds inside and outside
government.”
Another early accomplishment of the e-government model was the introduction
of the relatively untested cash on delivery (COD) payment system.
Services ordered through the e-government website could be prepaid
using a credit card, or paid in cash upon delivery. In the case
of a driver’s license, for instance, the citizen would pay
once it physically arrives at their door. The introduction of a
COD payment system was important, Bedair believes, because previously
citizens would often pay for government services that they never
received. Here the government was delivering the service promptly,
and only then requesting payment.
An educational experience
The Egyptian Government Service Portal currently offers 24 different
links to websites providing government services and information.
Perhaps the most ambitious application to date is Tansik, the process
through which education officials evaluate the applications of high
school graduates to determine which university they are eligible
to attend based on their overall thanawiya amma (high school exams)
score. The service was added to the site in 2005 as an optional
way to apply for enrollment. For students completing high school
as of June 2007 or later, online application became mandatory.
It was an enormous task if only because of the sheer number of students,
admits Bedair. “There were over 400,000 students applying
this year and they had no other option but to use the e-government
[website]. This was very secure and definitely a lot more efficient,”
he says. “Students entered their own information and their
[profile] was password protected. They could amend their entries
and selections whenever they wanted to with little or no hassle,
even if they didn’t have a computer of their own. Getting
to the nearest IT club is a lot easier than traveling back and forth
to the enrollment office, especially if you live in rural Egypt.”
Moreover, the online process reduced the margin of human error.
Bedair explains that previously, students filled in their application
by hand and filed it with an enrollment office representative, who
gave it to a data-entry clerk to be entered into a computer. “This
created a lot of room for errors as people entered incorrect information
or wrong grades. So by having each person enter his or her own information,
we have reduced the chance of errors.”
The online Tansik project has had positive feedback, says Bedair.
“This is probably because we decided that if we made a mistake
on any of the applications, we would take the responsibility to
fix it because this is a child’s future. But thus far, the
project has had a good run.”
The same can be said for the e-government project itself. The Egyptian
Government Service Portal currently receives between 250,000 and
300,000 hits a week. Bedair points out that citizens still have
the option of standing in long lines at ministries and state agencies.
But with these same services just a few mouse clicks away, why would
they?
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