Challenges

In 2016, Kazakhstan was the world’s ninth-biggest country by land mass with a population of 18 million people, which is relatively small. Traditionally, government services in Kazakhstan required the involvement from 3 or more public bodies with large number of paperwork and long waiting time were involved. As a result, the citizens of Kazakhstan had to travel great distances to initiate the process of government services.

Challenges faced:

• Business processes were complicated and lacked integration between information systems
• 5 ministries with many entities were involved. Such us: Ministry of Information and Communications, Ministry of Healthcare, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population, Ministry of Education and Science.
• Providing simple and user-centric services required strong co-operation between ministries and departments

Toward a Solution

The government of Kazakhstan took aspiration to establish a proactive digital economy and services with the primary goal to enhance the lives of the citizens by leveraging digital tools and to strengthen its international competitiveness.  Proactive services itself will track the life situations and perform the required processes for a citizen, while a citizen will only need to confirm these actions.

Goals aimed by the Proactive E-service initiative:

• meet the actual needs of the citizens
• enhance citizen engagement processes
• reduce administrative burden
• reduce time of proceeding
• provide better monitoring of public service delivery
• curb corruption by excluding citizen’s contact with public officials as much as possible
• transform the relationship between citizens and government
• bring innovation in the public sectors

In order to meet the goals, the government itself pushes a relevant service at the right time to the citizen. Establish one proactive service provider which handles 1 complex service that meet the actual need of citizens and eliminate the need for paperwork and visits. 

The strategy of the State Program “Digital Kazakhstan” looked into the following directions:

• Digitalization of the economy
• Transition to a digital state
• Implementation of the digital silk road
• Human capital development
• Creating an innovation ecosystem

One example of such Proactive E-service is “Child Birth” which was launched on December 2017. “Child birth” is rendered without the participation of a service recipient. Through the proactive service, users can name their newborn child, apply for a birth certificate, queue up at the kindergarten, find out the amount of the lump sum payment and register at their place of residence.

Other examples of Proactive E-services are:

• E-licensing
• Taxpayer cabinet
• Anti-corruption measures

The implementation of Proactive E-services has provide Kazakhstan with the following outcome:

• Enhanced citizen trust
• Raised service accessibility by reaching out to the citizen and initiating service processes
• Contributed to the digital skills training
• Changed the way government functions, delivers services, and solves public problems, making it more efficient
• Fundamentally changed the way people are used to communicate with the government

Bringing together ministries, departments and agencies has enabled the sharing of data. Citizens are bothered no more by making them go through various application processes and documents. Resource and time requirements were reduced – services became more efficient and cost effective. Traditionally the citizens had to take a minimum of 3 steps for a service, now they need to take just one step, send an SMS.