The ICT Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt held a special breakfast on July 6 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Cairo with guest speaker Minister of State for Administrative Development Ahmed Darwish, who gave a presentation entitled “The road to good governance... are we serious?”

In July 2005, the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Development proposed 26 principles to change the way government works and its relationship with civil society. The plan, Darwish explained, recognized the components that must be present in a country in order to achieve good governance, two of the most important being “a governing body that is efficient and effective, and the active participation of civil society.”

At the state level, Darwish noted that the most important principle involves redefining the role of government. “It is very important to recognize that central government should focus on setting up the [suitable] environment rather than doing things themselves, and it should not be involved in any production activities,” he said. “Central government should concentrate on policies and strategies, while most of the implementation should be moved to local government.”

As for enhancing the participation of civil society, the minister pointed out that according to Article 27 of the Egyptian constitution, “those who benefit from public projects should share in managing and monitoring these projects.” While he said steps were being taken to get civil society more involved in the decision-making process, he admitted much needs to be done. “It starts from the bottom up, from small decisions taken at schools or at the municipality level. There are pros and cons for each issue and those who live in these areas should start to be actively involved in making those decisions,” he said.

Darwish discussed how the government is moving away from production activities and project management by pursing public-private partnerships (PPPs). He noted successes of PPPs in implementing the e-government program, electrical distribution networks and the family smart card pilot program. “For the private sector, this is where the true opportunities in government lie,” he said. “We had a couple of successful projects implemented with the e-government program but now we are widening the scope.

The minister then addressed proposals to deal with the size and quality of central government. He said plans are under way to “redefine government jobs that are not part of its core business,” noting that Egypt’s 6 million-strong government workforce includes 983,000 teachers, approximately 400,000 doctors and medical professionals, 367,000 maintenance workers and about 626,000 “support services” workers, who clean and cater public offices. “These are not government employees anywhere in the world by any definition,” he asserted.

The goal now is to reclassify each job into a specific category so that the government can be trimmed down to a more manageable size. “It’s possible that we could get central government to be around 500,000 according to this classification, which is very close to the right size for the Egyptian government,” he said.

Darwish said more efforts should be made to improve the quality of government service. He said efforts are under way to establish a monitoring agency, develop the concept of a service level agreement and focus on human resource development. Until these programs are in place, incentives are being used to encourage good performance. “For the time being, we’re using a positive reward system including competitions for the best service provided at the window, best government website and most active government manager or administrator. This will create a sense of competition for excellence and quality in government,” he said.

Other issues addressed during the event included measures to initiate the principles and concepts outlined, steps being taken to discourage corruption, and rules and procedures regarding the national ID card.