Digital transformation of public services of Madagascar
By Joanne Esmyot, former Director at Public Digital.
In 2019, Public Digital began working with the Government of Madagascar as they embarked on their digital transformation journey. Funded by the World Bank, the engagement involved conducting a digital maturity assessment of the public sector in Madagascar, and we met with several stakeholders convinced of the potential of digital in improving the day-to-day lives of the Malagasy people and growing the economy. For Madagascar’s digital transformation, these were early days.
Three years down the line, Public Digital is once again privileged to work with the Government of Madagascar as part of the World Bank-supported PRODIGY programme. In the last three years, the landscape has drastically changed: The government has set up a multidisciplinary team of nearly 30 people ready to take up the challenge of digitally transforming public services in Madagascar.
The Digital Governance Unit is a team of passionate individuals full of ambition and committed to serving their country. The DGU falls under the administrative control of the Presidency, and its technical supervision is under the Ministry of Digital Development, Digital Transformation, Posts and Telecommunications (MNDPT).
The DGU’s mandate is both to develop and support the development of digital public services that are user-centred, simple to use and inclusive. The team has already launched an online business registration service (Orinasa), and an online vaccination service that allows the management of Covid-19 vaccines certificates (Vaksiny).
In mid-September, our team travelled to Antananarivo for a two-week long visit which will mark the beginning of a two-year collaboration with the DGU. Joanne (from Mauritius), Emily (from the UK), Jules (from Rwanda), Pascale (from Canada) and Claire (from the UK) had the pleasure of meeting the 28 team members of the DGU, a start-up within the Malagasy government. We were struck by the commitment of the team members to work for their country. Most of them have previous private sector experience as developers, UX/UI designers or product owners. Together, we reflected on a roadmap for the DGU as well as its institutional design to allow it to go further and refocus its priorities for the next 3 months.
We also had the honour of meeting some of the key stakeholders involved in the digital transformation of Madagascar: Secretary General of the Presidency, MNDPT, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Communication and Culture, CIRT.
We thank them for their warm welcome and commend their commitment to the digital transformation of Madagascar. We look forward to building better digital services for the Malagasy people together.