Advancing Madagascar's digital transformation through user-centred services

Accessing public services in Madagascar can be challenging and time-intensive for citizens. 

Basic tasks, like checking the operating hours of a public office or obtaining a government form, typically require in-person visits. A two-tiered system exists: the wealthy use connections to fast-track services, while many face long waits and poor services.

The country's identity management system exacerbates this, with nearly a quarter of the population lacking proper identification. This is not only hindering citizen access to education and healthcare services, but limiting voting rights and thus weakening trust in government.

In response to this, the World Bank and the Government of Madagascar launched PRODIGY in 2019 - a project to develop a more robust digital identity management system and thereby increase the offering, coverage and quality of public services.

Since 2019, Public Digital has been working with the government’s Digital Governance Unit to accelerate the PRODIGY project and transform the accessibility and usability of public services for Malagasy citizens.

Public Digital helped the Government of Madagascar design its strategy then implement its digital transformation roadmap.

Our support focused on sustainability by fostering the development of internal digital capabilities and user-centric services.

We started working with the Government of Madagascar in 2019. We conducted a comprehensive digital maturity assessment, engaging with over 200 individuals across government and associated institutions.

We then developed a digital transformation roadmap and secured political backing to drive its implementation. The focus was to build strong and sustainable internal digital capabilities, and design and run user-centred services.

Our recommendations and support included:

• Establishing a new Chief Digital Officer (CDO) role and team - leading to the creation of the Digital Governance Unit (DGU).

• Working with the new CDO and Economic Development Board of Madagascar to create a beacon digital service: the Orinasa business registration service.

• Building a multidisciplinary team, and providing expert coaching to introduce and embed new agile, user-centred ways of working.

• Supporting the PRODIGY Project Implementation Unit explore agile procurement methodologies. This included running workshops with local digital service providers to facilitate future collaborations between the government and suppliers from the Malagasy digital ecosystem.

This initial focus on digital team structure and methodology has enabled us to work collaboratively with the DGU since 2022 across a range of topics including:

• strategy, organisation and governance;
• capability-building;
• agile and user-centred service delivery;
• interoperability and data services;
• digital ID.

Through our design sprints, we identified that the DGU had primarily focused resources on ‘Torolalana’ - an online one-stop-shop portal for citizens to access public services. Whilst this work was important, it only served the 20% of the Malagasy population able to access services online.

We worked with the DGU to identify a flagship service through which to pilot a more inclusive, multichannel offer. The DGU identified Paositra Malagassy (Madagascar’s postal service) as a potential partner due to their extensive geographical presence and position as a trusted institution among the Malagassy population.

After testing this idea through guerrilla user research, the team started to work on a prototype of ‘Mahatoky’ (meaning trust in Malagassy) - a digital solution that enables post office staff to better support citizens with low connectivity to access public services.

The DGU selected postal offices, trained their staff and tested Mahatoky, which has received positive feedback from users. The DGU is now scaling the service across post offices and adding new content to the solution. 

Their goal is to eventually offer transactional public services to the entire population through the post office network.

This flagship model is a key part of our support to help DGU pivot to a more inclusive, multichannel approach comprising not just the online Torolalana portal, but a call centre, text-message services, and an in-person channel.