eFez: Local Good Governance Outcomes in a Developing World Context

Driss Kettani
Alakhawayn University in Ifrane
d.kettani@aui.ma

Michael Gurstein
http://www.communityinformatics.net
gurstein@gmail.com

Asmae Elmahdi
Alakhawayn University in Ifrane
a.elmahdi@aui.ma

Abstract

This paper presents the conceptual framework and research approach underlying the pilot e-Government implementation for the ancient city of Fez, Morocco. Specifically, this article presents a range of understandings concerning the concepts of governance, good governance, and e-Government as they are understood to apply in the systematic assessment of outcomes and results of the project implementation. Indicators are identified for enabling a project outcome assessment as a means to understand the project’s possible contribution to the enhancement of good governance at the municipal level.

Keywords: Governance, Good Governance, ICT, E-Government, State transformation, public administration, service delivery, outcomes, indicators, automation, systematic assessment method,

Introduction

The eFez project has been concerned to automate one of the most actively used citizen-oriented services in Morocco: the provision of birth certificates (BC) delivered through municipal government offices known as “Bureaux d’Etat Civil (BEC)”.

The BEC are government offices that maintain the records concerning the variety of life events of local citizens including birth, marriage, divorce, the changing of one’s name, and death. The maintaining of such records makes the BEC the only institution authorized to (and capable of) providing citizens with certificates authenticating their respective life events. Such an authentication is, under the Moroccan administrative system (following the conventional practice within the French and French colonial systems), required for the undertaking of a variety of personal, formal and administrative procedures such as for example obtaining employment in the formal business sector, registering for social services, applying for a passport and so on.

The eFez research team has in other contexts referred to the existing administrative systems in the BEC (as with many public administrations in developing countries) as being in an archaic mode¹ as evidenced for example by a complete reliance on manual systems and most importantly on procedures and practices which take no account of the opportunities provided by digital storage, electronic communication, automated work flow and s on. (Kettani et al, 2005, 2008). The BEC is archaic in the sense that its current service delivery is completely manual and paper-based with its supporting practices and procedures similarly being based on face to face, pen and ink and hard copy documentation and administrative officer to citizen transactions.

The eFez project addressed all aspects of the BEC system for service management. This included data storage, information input and retrieval, documentation and workflow simplification and so on. The project succeeded in automating both the back and front offices of the project (BEC) site, in this way changing the service delivery from archaic-manual service delivery to automated. This development has been widely recognized as a highly innovative and significant achievement both within the Moroccan and overall developing country contexts.²

The rationale for undertaking a project of automation such as this in this context however, was not simply to make a contribution to overall digitization of government operations, rather it was based on the strong belief that the introduction of the technologies and modes of operation provided by an e-Government implementation such as this can make a useful and identifiable contribution to overall aspirations within Morocco towards the realization of recognized standards of good governance and particularly at the local or municipal level.

This paper presents the theoretical foundation underlying the eFez project seen not simply as a technical contribution or as a technical innovation. The intention with this paper is to demonstrate the underlying conceptual framework for making the link between the project as a technical system design and implementation and the project as an attempted intervention into the on-going archaic local administrative systems in Morocco in support of a revision of these towards contemporary and widely recognized definitions, standards and attribute of good governance.

The eFez Theoretical Framework

The eFez project seen from a governance perspective rests on a set of assumptions and theory-based linkages connecting governance with good governance, and good governance in turn with e-Government. In this context e-Government is linked with the creation of conditions fostering good governance, understood within a local public administration in a developing country environment.

The Role of Public Administration in Governance

Public sector administration is a key element in modern life. Denthardt and Grubbs (2003) refer to “Public administration as the management of public programs” (2, 28). Doherty and Horne (2002) date public programs, and by extension, public services to the nineteenth century industrial revolution: the resulting wealth facilitated the creation and spread of urban areas; and governments undertaking a responsibility to provide services for the “well being” of citizens (4). Public programs in this context are designated by the state’s regulatory body (i.e. law), to pursue goals charged with political dimensions, and receive supporting funding from tax payments (5). Since public administration operates in a political environment it needs to comply with democratic values and principles (Denthardt and Grubbs, 2003: 3-4) (in democratic societies).

Public administration is defined as an element among the “state’s” “public organizations which in total constitute the system of governmental institutions”; specifically, the public administration is “the key output linkage of the state towards civil society”; put differently, “public administration is the administrative interface between the state and civil society” (Peters, 1995: 9, 205).

Public administration in Developed Countries has undergone major changes as it has responded to transformations in the fundamental nature, purpose, role, and practices within society. Toffler (cited in Denthardt and Grubbs, 2003: 18) advances a certain chronological order/ typology in the evolution of “human organizations” (including public administrations): “First-wave pre-industrial organizations” were built to serve pre-industrial agricultural societies in their harvesting activities; “Second-wave industrial organizations” developed (centralized, hierarchical, bureaucratic, and uniform mechanisms) to serve growing urban populations, emerging as a result of the industrial revolution; and “Third-wave decentralized organizations”, evolved (into more flexible structures) to address the needs of post-industrial societies. Peters (2003), explains that over the last decades, public administrations (in Developed Countries) underwent rapid transformative changes, shifting away from the “traditional administration” model to “New Public Management” and “Governance” models.

The “traditional” model of public administration, also known also as the “classical” or “conventional” model, rested on a set of assumptions, principles, and practices. The “traditional administration” came to replace and transform the pre-industrial organizations. The “traditional administration” aimed to address the needs of the capitalist (and by implication of the colonial) system, emerging following the industrial revolution (Felts and Jos, 2000: 520-1).

The classical administration worked on establishing practices built on key principles, such as uniformity, routinization, and predictability. It sought to establish structures functioning with bureaucratic internal management. Literally meaning, “rule by office or by official”, bureaucracy is defined as “a form of organization that is well suited to many activities, especially activities such as education and criminal justice, which rely on the keeping of accurate records” (Doherty and Horne, 2002: 16). The emerging capitalist system pursued efficiency in its mass production endeavor. Felts and Jos (2000) explain that “the challenge of mass-production capitalism was to communicate uniformly and act quickly across greater and greater spaces” (521). Accordingly, the conventional administration organized itself via building hierarchical structures with centralized control complying to clear rules, standards, and procedures.

Yet, by 1970s and 1980s (in Developed Country contexts), the “classical” model of public administration had received many critiques calling for “a more humane and especially a more efficient government” (Peters, 2003). A bureaucracy that served industrial societies well was becoming incompatible with changing realities (fueled by the opportunities and challenges of technology, mass media and globalization). “The shift has been from seeing public administration as a vehicle for social change towards perceiving it as a major obstacle to such change” (Pierre, 1995: 2).

Bureaucracy, or “big government”, became increasingly at odd with a growing renewed ideology of free market oriented neo-liberalism that started at the aftermath of the Second World War as an extension, “resurgence” and continuity of “liberalism” (Heeks, 1999: 11). Bureaucratic inefficiencies were found at different levels of the public sector: “inputs” because of the mounting costs needed to run and fund public programs and services, “processes” due to problems arising from the way public affairs were handled, including “waste, delay, mismanagement and corruption within the public sector, all of which contributed to inefficiency in the conversion of public expenditure into public services”, and “outputs” as dissatisfaction was fueled with the growing conviction that “the public sector was not delivering what it should …. [which] undermined the wider social outcomes of public sector activity”(Heeks, 1999: 10). This led to a growing phenomenon known as: “structural reform of the public sector”, “reassessment of the public sector” (Peters, 1995: 2), and “Reinventing Government” (Osborne, and Gaebler, 1992) and ultimately (with a considerable in-put from neo-liberal critics of government intervention in general) the adoption of principles and practices associated with “New Public Management” (NPM).

In its quest for efficiency, the NPM calls for a well defined reform agenda, making “the reinvented” administration almost the antithesis of the “classical administration”. The rationale for such reforms is to reduce the costs of centralized decision making and to create more flexible and responsive decision making” (Heeks, 1999: 13). It is also a way to “empower” citizens by providing them access for being involved in decision making.

De-bureaucratization reform aimed at “re-engineering” the work of public administration, to make it more responsive to citizens, who in turn became perceived as “consumers” and “clients” with all of their diverse needs. However, NPM faced many critics due mainly to its emphasis on the primacy of market principles and values and the absence of “democratic values in administration” (Peters, 2003). NPM focuses its attention mainly on technical and managerial aspects of public administration in pursuing cost-effective performance, while overlooking the need to consider “social outcomes” and “public value” in fulfilling public interventions. These limitations are of particular significance in the Developing Country context which may lack the specific skills and organizational/managerial alternatives required by the NPM and where the particular local/national context (as for example in the case of Morocco) may introduce an institutional complexity which doesn’t lend itself to the sometimes simplistic (and culturally insensitive) solutions offered by the NPM approach.

Revisions and reflections on these circumstances led to what became known as the “Post Washington consensus”; which brought governance to the spotlight. It was then argued that reforms and their intended development could only occur within a context of conditions of what became known as good governance. Jaya Soriya and Rosser (2001). The World Bank’s Kaufmann demonstrated empirically how “good governance matters” by bringing about economic growth (Kaufmann et al, 2003).

The UNDP further promoted “good governance” as a condition for not only economic growth but for a broader process of “sustainable human development”. Following this, “good governance” became a key element in Development Studies and became seen as a main driver for “building institutional capacity” (Jaya Soriya & Rosser, 2001; World Bank, 1991. International donors, mainly the World Bank and the IMF, started to realize that “structural reform without the concomitant set of institutions to support such reform is likely to fail” (389).³ The public sector reform agenda in developing countries became more concerned with “institution building” known also as “capacity reinforcement. Capacity building pursues a two-fold approach: reforming and improving the structures associated with public administration; and developing personnel capable of effectively operating and running the organizational structures of public administration.

In the contemporary context (including in Developing Countries) public sector reform and its related capacity building must necessarily integrate new technologies as enabling tools. Heeks (1999) explains this by noting that “reinventing government is a continuation of existing new public management reforms, but reinventing government in the information age should mean two things that are different:

• First, a much greater (i.e. more overt) role for information and information systems in the processes of change;

• Second, a much greater (i.e. more widely employed) role for information technology in the processes of change” (16)

This paper and the larger (eFez) research project (and agenda) of which it is a part should be seen as a contribution and an extension of this discussion.

The intention with the overall research is to delineate and concretize the link between the overall conceptual approach to good governance as defined within the development conceptualizations and strategies of agencies such as the World Bank and the UNDP and the realities of a specific information technology systems implementation on the ground in support of the service delivery by a local administration. Thus the specific contribution intended by this overall work and this particular paper is to forge a conceptual and ultimately a practical link between the broad and general concepts identified with good governance and how these might be realized in the specific and pragmatic circumstance of the digitization of the birth certificate delivery service in one small area of the city of Fez in Morocco. Our fundamental notion is that it is possible to demonstrate how and in what degree our particular technology implementation can (and cannot) have outcomes which contribute to the creation of conditions of good governance at the municipal level in Fez and if here, then through extension and scaling up, to the creation of such conditions throughout Morocco and even potentially elsewhere in the Developing world.

Our claim, it should be noted is not that eFez is creating good governance, but rather that eFez, through paying a close attention to its activities and outcomes can be shown to be a potentially significant contributor to the overall creation of the good governance condition. It should further be noted that the specific contribution of this paper is, through a close examination of the conceptual underpinnings of the notion of good governance to provide a means by which the activities and outcomes of eFez can be both conceptually and pragmatically linked into this overall formulation. In this way it may offer a pragmatic and theoretical means to integrate certain of the practical implications of a technology driven managerial approach to public sector reform in an LDC context with the more recent concerns for good governance and particularly good governance as a pre-condition to broader concerns with development.

Defining “Good Governance”

The notion of governance has been defined in varying ways. The World Bank Group (WBG) defines governance in terms of how “…power is exercised through a country’s economic, political, and social institutions” (The World Bank, 2006a). This definition presents governance as the sum of activities and processes shaping power use within institutional units of a national state. In this respect, governance for the World Bank is mainly concerned with governments and how they control their internal processes.

The UNDP defines governance as:

“the exercise of economic, political, and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations, and mediate their differences” (UNDP, 1997).

Another notion related to governance is good governance. For the World Bank, good governance is governance (or power use) that is:

…epitomized by predictable, open and enlightened policy making; a bureaucracy imbued with a professional ethos; an executive arm of government accountable for its actions; and a strong civil society participating in public affairs, and all behaving under the rule of law” (World Bank, 2006a)

For the UNDP (1997), good governance is described as being:

…among other things participatory, transparent and accountable. It is also effective and equitable. And it promotes the rule of law fairly. Good governance ensures that the voices of the poorest and the most vulnerable are heard in decision-making over the allocation of development resources, and that political, social and economic priorities are based on broad consensus among the three stakeholders - the state, private sector and civil society” (UNDP, 1997).

It appears from the above definitions that good governance refers mainly to an improved quality of governance; that is, how governance should take place. Accordingly, the two international institutions share a common perception of what good governance is since they emphasize governance issues such as openness, accountability, participation, and the rule of law (Haldenwang, 2004: 419) with, according to the IDRC (2005: 8), the most inclusive and comprehensive definition of good governance being that provided by the UNDP.

There is not much disagreement on components that make “good governance”. Mainly because they are normative judgements on how governance “should” be or aspire to be in real settings. IDRC (2005: 8),

More precisely, good governance can be defined in terms of its components and elements. The UNDP lists 9 specific characteristics as can be seen in Table 1 below.

Table.1: The UNDP’s nine underlying characteristics of good governance

(Source: table created by author using UNDP definitions as direct quotes from UNDP (1997))

From the above table, good governance can be seen as requiring transparent/open, accountable, efficient/effective, and responsive governance structures which operate in a manner so as to not violate principles of equity and the rule of law as well as enabling the involvement and empowerment of citizens to actively participate in the achievement of consensus and the building and sharing of a strategic vision for development.

But it is one thing to agree more or less on “good governance” values; and another to put these into practice and have them integrated and internalized in governance systems. That is why in the eFez project the intention was to “get the institutions right first”; the underlying premise being, following Derick & Goldsmith (2005) and others that “better run public institutions (are) the most important instrument for fostering economic growth and reducing poverty” (Jaya Soriya & Rosser, 2001; World Bank, 1991, UNDP, 1997).⁴

e-Government and Good Governance

e-Government is another related notion. The United Nations defines e-Government as “utilizing the internet and the world-wide-web for delivering government information and services to citizens” (UN, 2001: 1). In this regards, e-Government is when a government institution uses Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in serving citizens and meeting their informational and transactional needs. In fact, the expansion of ICT worldwide, that is behind the accelerating globalization, has also led to its diffusion within public administrations. Such diffusion has in turn led to varying degrees of electronically enabling the three functions of governments (Finger, 2005: 4). Accordingly, ICT applications use has revolutionized the service delivery function. Finger indicates that this function is “where ICT(s) have, so far, made the most spectacular inroads” (2004: 6).

The World Bank 2006b defines e-Government as

“the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and accountability of government. E-Government can be seen simply as moving citizen services online, but in its broadest sense it refers to the technology-enabled transformation of government - governments’ best hope to reduce costs, whilst promoting economic development, increasing transparency in government, improving service delivery and public administration, and facilitating the advancement of an information society” (World Bank, 2006b)

From this definition, it is clear that the World Bank highlights the numerous benefits achieved by implementing e-Government. These benefits, including accountability, transparency, and efficiency, are similar to the goals and characteristics of good governance. In this sense, e-Government can be seen as a mechanism to operationalize the notion of good governance.

Haldenwang (2004: 419) confirms this relation by identifying conceptual/theoretical linkages between the two concepts. He indicates that “both concepts share the same objectives” in that “administrative efficiency, the quality of public services, and democratic participation are core principles of both” (2004: 419). He explains the underlying reason behind such a relation to be e-Government’s “dualistic approach to state modernization: it combines an internal focus on administrative reform with an external focus on state-citizen (or state-customer) relations” (2004: 419). In other words, e-Government is a means for achieving good governance because it changes both the government back office (government internal operations and relations) and front office (government external relations with citizens) operations in a way that makes the different components of good governance a reality.

The eFez Influence on Service Delivery

To appreciate and recognize the eFez contribution and influence, it is necessary to understand the manual service delivery existing before the project and the automated service delivery introduced and established by eFez.

The eFez project modernized the BEC internal operations related to Birth Certificate (BC) service delivery, specifically in one local administrative office. The project digitized and stored citizens’ recorded life events’ information in a database and developed a system enabling instant retrieval of that information as needed.

eFez produced an electronically enabled (BEC) “back office” (data storage system) as well as an electronically enabled front office including three different “channels” for delivering BC’s to citizens: an electronically enabled employee desk, a touch screen kiosk, and an online eFez portal.

Unlike with the manual service delivery, approaching the employee is no longer mandatory with the automated service delivery. The automated delivery allows for multi-channel requests for service. Under the new system:

1. A citizen approaches the employee in charge to submit his/her request, or

2. A citizen uses a touch screen kiosk in order to submit, process, and print his/her needed Birth Certificate (BC) by himself/ by herself, or

3. A citizen consults the eFez portal to submit, process, and print his/her needed BC by himself/herself online

The three channels enable the citizen to instantly print as many copies as needed of the retrieved information related to the BC.

The eFez Method for Assessing Good Governance

In its research component eFez paid special attention to the changes that resulted from the implementation of the system. It focused its research on assessing the results achieved and generated with the deployment of its outputs. We elaborated and refined what we termed: the Outcome Analysis Method in order to investigate the relationship between the eFez project implementation (i.e. automating service delivery) and good governance.

In this method, we used the “inclusive and comprehensive” attributes of good governance as defined by the UNDP (Table 1) as the basic template for our on-going assessment of the outcomes of the project. Based on these attributes we developed “Working Definitions” of contextualized within the operating framework of the eFez project and implementation. That is, we took each of the attributes and through a process of discussion and reflection within the eFez team, we determined how each attribute might be defined in a manner could be or was practically being operationalized through the eFez implementation. In this way, we generated a set of Working Definitions tailored to the requirements of the project.

We then developed a set of measurable indicators associated with each of the working definitions i.e. ways of translating the working definitions into observable measures related to the activities and processes of the eFez project and implementation. (Table 2)

Table 2: eFez Good Governance Definitions, Project Working Definitions and Associated Indicators

Having developed the indicators associated with the attributes of good governance we were then able to observe and “measure” the influence of the eFez implementation on this specific service area within the municipality of Fez. Specifically, we were able to conduct “before and after” observations and undertake measurements associated with the project implementation, observing the existing system of service delivery in order to gather appropriate “baseline data”.

The result of the operationalising of the system has been an automation of service delivery (for the production of birth certificates). The resulting service delivery system, process and outcomes were observed and analyzed to identify changes from the existing system. At this stage, fieldwork was conducted to answer the questions concerning the outcomes of the changed system. In other words, our fieldwork tracked the identified indicators before the system deployment and after the system deployment.

The results of these observations and measurements can be seen in Table 3: Column 3 (before the system) and Column 4 (after the system’s implementation).

Table 3: Good governance related results (before and after) the eFez automated service delivery (of birth certificates)

From the above table, the eFez experience shows that focused intervention in/ and modification of citizen oriented service delivery via ICT use was a driver in generating far-reaching changes and a significant improvement in the identified attributes of good governance. In other words, it can be said that the eFez introduction of ICT use in service delivery enabled a “leapfrogging” in the quality of local governance⁵ with respect to this particular service area.

eFez and the Attributes of Good Governance

Transparency

The indicator for transparency: “visibility of workflows for citizens” was investigated before and after the system deployment. Since the BEC back-office was completely manual, sub processes of making BC requests, processing requests, and filling out the requested copies of the BC were carried out as separate and invisible tasks (and sometimes by different employees). The result was that the citizen could not monitor or track the progress of his/her BC request. Thus the time required to process, or possible reasons for a delay in processing are not generally visible (transparent) to the applicant. This lack of visibility in the delivery sub-processes gave tremendous power to the employee who could process the request whenever it was “convenient” for him/her. Now, with automated service delivery, the sub processes—making the BC request, processing the request, and printing the processed BC are merged in one process carried out on a real time basis. The major and most noticeable consequence of this is to enable citizens to monitor and “track” the progress of their requested service. This ensures a principle of: first-come-first-served, which was regularly violated in the previous opaque manual system.

Efficiency and effectiveness

Automating the service delivery also influenced the attribute of efficiency and effectiveness for service beneficiaries both as citizens and as tax payers. To measure the influence, the indicators: “possibility of citizens making optimal use of their resources to request and obtain services” and “the possibility of making optimal use of scarce public resources” were investigated before and after the deployment of the automated system. With the previous manual workflow, requesting and obtaining a service was costly for citizens in terms of time, effort, and even money necessarily expended in obtaining the service. Citizen-oriented services like birth certificates were not delivered immediately upon a citizen’s request. Rather, the elapsed time between the BC request and the BC delivery (i.e. delivery waiting time) depended on two main factors: the number of not yet processed citizens’ requests for BCs, and the number of BC associated copies requested by each citizen. Consequently, waiting time for citizens requesting at least 10 birth certificates ranged from one working day to six working days. The slow service delivery was costly also in terms of effort. Citizens needed to queue up within the BEC for hours and also needed to make several physical trips to the BEC first to submit their request and then to check if the processing was accomplished and often further visits in order to pick up their certificates. These physical trips exponentially increased citizens’ time expenditures and traveling costs to the BEC.

With automated service delivery, requesting and receiving BC copies has become simplified with the possibility of delivering BCs immediately upon citizens’ requests, regardless of the number of requested copies, or the number of citizens making their requests in the meantime. The automated delivery makes it possible for citizens to obtain their printed copies of the BC signed and stamped in less than five minutes, as opposed to the hours and sometimes days required with the manual system. Thus BC requests are now delivered on a timely basis which eliminates queuing and standing in line. In addition, the instant delivery ensures that there is no need for more than one physical trip to the BEC; and hence, enables reduction in traveling costs to the BEC.

The previous manual service delivery also was an efficient use of public resources. When the demand for BCs was low or moderate, the BEC needed 3 full time employees to process citizens’ requests. When demand on the BC became high (during summer and fall periods), all BEC employees (10) stopped their other tasks in order to process BC requests. During the active season for BCs, other services, such as registering births, processing death certificate requests and the like stopped being processed. Furthermore, employees often took BC requests home to be processed, which is illegal.

With the automated service, there are no full time employees assigned to process BC requests.

Equity

The manual delivery system was plagued with problems of long waiting times and queuing. These problems created the conditions for queue jumping. Citizens would give “tips” (small bribes) or use social connections to make the employee in charge serve them more promptly than others. Thus with manual delivery citizens were not being served in an equitable fashion (those with resources or connections could jump the queue) and disadvantaged citizens (who were not able to pay bribes or without connections) received lower quality of service as evidenced in longer waiting time, more physical trips, and thus higher traveling costs.⁶

With automated service delivery, citizens are served equitably. The use of ICT eliminated the need for citizens to tip in order to be promptly served because automation enables and ensures instant service delivery for everybody. In this respect, the automated service delivery enables all citizens to be served on a timely and in a similarly professional manner (regardless of their social class).

Rule of Law

As with the attribute of equiy” in the context of the previous manual service delivery, laws were not being applied impartially. Getting preferred service as a result of a “tip” or other means is against the law in Morocco and yet this practice was routinely tolerated as an element in the operation of the BEC. As Aboudrar (2005: 154) points out the incidence of corruption in Morocco is so common that it has come to be seen as no longer abnormal and illegitimate. The automated service delivery has eliminated the need and the opportunity to violate the rule of law in this instance through providing opportunities for providing special privileges.

Participation

The eFez automation has also had implications on the good governance attribute of participation as seen in terms of citizen empowerment. Specifically, eFez used the working definition of participation as being the process of empowering citizens to legally control the service delivery to their advantage (i.e. disintermediation that involves reducing/eliminating the roles of middle people in service delivery). With the manual service delivery, citizens’ were limited in their possible intervention into the service delivery, being able only to approach the employee in charge and orally submit BC requests and then paying for the “stamps” on the document when they picked up their processed BC copies. In this way, citizens were excluded from access to the range of sub-processes in the service delivery. Citizens were thus helpless with respect to any issues which might arise in the course of the manual workflow or in being able to monitor the progress of their requests through the system. In addition, they could do nothing (except tip/bribe) if problems arose as a result of employees processing requests only when it was “convenient” for them or to respond to the issue of employees allowing and benefiting from queue jumpers. Citizens had no legal means to intervene in the service delivery process.

With automated service delivery and especially its electronically enabled front office, citizens are freed from a dependency on the bureaucracy. With the touch screen kiosk and online delivery platform, citizens are “empowered” to submit their BC requests and process/print as many copies as they need remotely and by themselves in real time.

eFez has empowered citizens by providing them with legal ways for controlling the delivery of the service to their advantage and at their convenience.

Accountability

With manual service delivery, it was not possible to hold employees accountable for their work because the delivery system was so opaque and inconsistent that no standards were available. System opacity is a common problem to Morocco’s administration according to Aboudrar (2005: 167). The automated service delivery simplified and routinized the delivery system. The direct result of such a routinization was a visible, transparent, and consistent system. System consistency has made possible the development of standards against which employees can be hold accountable.

Responsiveness

Since the manual service delivery lacked consistency, delivery was not predictable. Citizens could not legally influence the system to make it predictable and responsive to their needs. This made access to services very challenging, which is a common problem in Morocco’s administrations according to Ourzik (2005: 123). Automated service delivery is by design predictable and instantly responsive to citizens’ needs.

eFez Automated Service Delivery Implications for Good Governance:

It is evident that automating citizen-oriented service delivery can generate results that positively affect certain of the attributes of good governance. Investigating the service delivery before and after the system deployment in terms of specified indicators (elaborated and refined to measure the outcomes) showed clear, concrete and noticeable changes in favor of attributes leading to good governance. The table below (Table 4) summarizes the good governance related outcomes of the eFez automated service delivery:

Table 4: eFez project outcomes related to good governance

(Source: Kettani et al, publication pending)

This process of linking the project’s outcomes in its automating of service delivery to the specific attributes of good governance reveals a clear pattern: that the project is making a contribution to good governance by enabling, facilitating and eventuating into a citizen-friendly service delivery function where there is a fostering of increased transparency, effectiveness and efficiency, participation, equity, rule of law, accountability and responsiveness.

It is notable that most citizens receiving their services by means of the new electronic delivery system have been requesting (based on information obtained both informally and formally via questionnaire) an extension of the use of ICT to the automation of the delivery of other services in other government offices. As well, citizens not currently receiving the BC service electronically have been requesting from their elected representatives that the service be extended. Also, an increasing number of civil servants at different levels of responsibilities (from employees to executives) are requesting the extension of the project to include their respective government offices within the automation program. It is notable as well that most of these civil servants were either indifferent to the eFez project or actively resisted it at its inception.

Additional Observations

While noting the overall success of the eFez project it is also worth observing that it is still facing certain weaknesses and challenges particularly as there is an active programme to “scale up” the initiative to cover the entire city of Fez and even potentially other Departments in Morocco and potentially as a the basis for a national program of automation of the BEC. Among these challenges are a lack of civil servants skilled in ICT implementation, management and related maintenance. Serious efforts are required for the development of in in-house capacity at the municipal (and national levels) within a context where local civil servants have low levels of public prestige, meager salaries and related low levels of education and technical skills. This in turn has led to a degree of conservatism on the part of the employees and a significant measure of resistance to change and unwillingness to pursue opportunities for upgrading.

Furthermore, while back office automation produces beneficial gains, its implementation remains a frequently painful passage. The ongoing scaling up of the eFES system to the remaining 30 BEC offices involves BEC back office automation including the digitization of the paper-based citizens’ records. These digitization operations have proved to be tedious, labor intensive and expensive and alternative strategies are being explored in this area. The eFES experience has been that although BEC employees quickly and smoothly adopt the automated way of delivering services to citizens, they are frequently resisting the tedious automation operations that are a prerequisite for enabling automated delivery. In response to such resistance, the Fez municipality has begun to outsource the data entry operations and has recruited employees specifically dedicated to these activities, with the BEC employees and officers remaining responsible for verifying and validating the accuracy of the digitized records.

Of course, a project of this kind has a range of other outcomes and impacts in addition to those which we have highlighted here⁷. Our intention with this paper was not to provide an overall “impact assessment” but rather to focus quite narrowly on establishing a link between this automation project and identified outcomes which would indicate that these activities were having and could be seen to be having direct results related to good governance.

As noted above, the rationale most generally given for investments in eGovernment are to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of governmental processes. Such a rationale is of course, very significant both in Developed and Developing Country contexts. However, as we have also noted above, there is an increasing perception among donors and others that good governance is a pre-condition for economic and social development. For the most part, good governance has been identified with administrative reform, capacity building and institutional development. While there is no question that each of these is of great significance it is an argument of this paper that e-Government can and should be seen as an equal partner with all of these in helping to realize good governance in Developing Countries and thus equally as a contributor in this way to broad national aspirations and strategies for “Development”.

Conclusion

The eFez implementation succeeded in automating the delivery of one of most actively used citizen oriented services in the developing country of Morocco. The automation generated far-reaching results and outcomes. Systematic assessment of the project results and outcomes was enabled via a method that elaborated and refined a set of indicators linked back to a widely recognized definition of “good governance”. Tracking and measuring project outcomes revealed that the project made a noticeable contribution in relation to certain attributes of good governance by enabling a citizen friendly service delivery characterized by transparent, empowering, efficient and effective access to services on an equal basis, which in turn reinforces accountability and the impartial application of laws.

The use of ICT in local governance institutions can thus be seen as a way to respond to the widely recognized need to enhance the institutions and processes of governance (and achieve a state of what is being defined as “good governance”). We thus would suggest that generalizing and promoting ICT use in Morocco’s public administrations (which overall suffers from the non-penetration of ICT), would enable the kind of concrete gains which we have demonstrated in our small scale eFez project to be felt on an exponentially larger scale, including impacting on the everyday lives of citizens and the capacity of governance institutions to respond to the growing needs of their constituents.

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Appendix

The manual service delivery of services like birth certificates consists of many sub-processes. The manual delivery process moves through the following task related stages:

• The citizen should first approach a BEC employee at the reception desk in order to submit his/her request for a birth certificate and the needed number of copies. To submit this request, the citizen should show the employee an old birth certificate or his/her family record book since they specify the references of the requested birth certificate.

• This employee writes down the certificate references on an empty certificate form. These references consist of:

  • the registration year of the certificate, and

  • the certificate serial (identification) number

• This employee gives these certificate references to a second employee who is in charge of looking for the BEC record book matching the certificate references provided by the citizen.

• Then, the second employee needs to place the empty certificate form on the BEC record book page listing the citizens’ life events information.

• The second employee needs finally to pass the record book to a third employee who is in charge of filling out the birth certificate forms.

• Once the form is completed, the third employee passes the certificate to the BEC officer for signature

• The signed birth certificate form goes back to the first employee at the reception desk to be attached with a 2 dirham stamp (for each copy) paid by the citizen.

From the above task related stages of the manual service delivery, it is clear that a citizen needed to submit a birth certificate request; then, pay for the stamps in order to pick up the requested copies of the needed birth certificate processed and signed

The BEC employee needed to receive the citizen’s request and process it by looking for the correspondent BEC record book, then, exactly copy the appropriate information to complete as many copies of birth certificate as requested by the citizen; and finally receive the citizen’s stamp payments

The BEC officer signed the processed copies of the birth certificate in order to provide formal authorization and validity

Employee Desk Request mode:

The service delivery runs as the following:

• A citizen : approaches a BEC employee (in charge of birth certificates (BC)) and provides his/her needed BC references (year of registration and serial number of BC)

• the employee : enters the BC references into the BEC application database to make a query; once the information is retrieved and displayed, he/she prints out the number of needed copies in a couple of seconds; then, she receives the citizen’s stamp payment for the printed copies of the BC

• the citizen then takes the BC to the BEC officer for signature

What has been changed in the actors’ tasks?

• Citizens’ tasks are the same: approaching the employee and providing BC references

• BEC employee’s tasks are reduced from 5 tedious and time consuming tasks to only 3 minimal tasks: a couple of mouse clicks to enter the BC references to the BEC application database, print out the number of needed copies, and receive the stamp payments. The employee’s most tedious task (copying the needed information as many times as requested by each citizen) is eliminated and substituted by querying the BEC citizens’ database to retrieve and print out requested information with 3 mouse clicks.

• The BEC officer’s tasks do not change, except for the unprecedented possibility of checking the accuracy of information with a couple of mouse clicks, as opposed to consulting the BEC Record book.

Touch Screen kiosk and online Request modes:

The automated delivery flows as follows:

• A citizen approaches the BEC kiosk or eFez related portal (instead of an employee), follows the step by step kiosk/online request with a couple of clicks to insert his/her needed BC references (year of registration and serial number of BC), and print out the number of needed copies in a couple of seconds, pay the employee stamps, and take the BC copies to the BEC officer for signature

What has been changed in the actors’ tasks?

• Citizen’s tasks have changed: he/she uses the touch screen kiosk or the related portal to undertake the BC request: a couple of clicks to enter the BC references into the BEC application database and print out the number of needed copies. The innovation is that citizens are able to request and process their requests by themselves remotely.

• BEC employee’s tasks are reduced from 5 tedious tasks to only 1 task: receiving stamp payments.

• BEC officer’s task does not change: signing copies of BC for formal authorization, except for the unprecedented possibility of checking the accuracy of information via the computer (as opposed to consulting the BEC Record book)