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Family Cards
Ministry Of State For Administrative Development
Egypt

The Problem

The initiative was invented to deliver a set of services to Egyptian families. For now there are two services that have been implemented, namely; food commodities and social pensions' distribution. Other services are ongoing; like for example, health insurance and infants' milk. Other services are planned to be added, such as transportation fees, gasoline, etc.

Before the initiative, delivering food commodities was completely manual and paper based, which led to lack of follow up, high leakage ratios, and in-accurate delivery of the commodities to the deserved families. The process implied that, each group of families targeted to receive food commodities is linked to a specific grocer. Accordingly, each grocer receives, on a monthly basis, the products corresponding to the summation of commodities for all families linked to that grocer, referred to as a full quota. Each family is provided with a paper card to receive the relevant monthly commodities. The family goes to the grocer, receives the commodities, and pays for what has been received and then signs a grocer paper document. Eventually, indispensable commodities are not monitored and the grocer can sell them outside the system. The grocer prepares a monthly report stating his quota, revises it with the supply office, and gets approval that the quota is correct. Then, the report goes to the wholesaler to receive the grocer's quota. So, the grocer receives, on a monthly basis, the full quota irrespective of the actual needs of the citizens.

Another weak point in the previous system is when the grocer receives his full quota from the wholesaler. He can illegally and informally, receive more than the full quota, in agreement with the supply office.

On the other hand, any changes in the family data (new born insertion in the paper card, family address change, grocer change …) should be registered on the paper document in the supply office, manually. The manual system is time consuming and does open doors for inconsistency of registries,. corruption, mistakes. Not to mention the large storage space needed to keep such documents in place.

Similarly, the delivery of social pensions suffered the same shortcomings before the initiative, (same process, same disadvantages). The people attaining the social pension were registered and received the service manually. However, the social pension is allowed to families according to certain social criteria which, manually, can be forged, and instead, non-eligible citizens can receive such pension.

Hence, the Egyptian government has adopted smart cards as a tool to provide various social and support services (food commodities, social pension, health insurance, educational support,…) to underprivileged citizens. Thus, the government relied on the use of information and communications technology as a means to manage and control the delivery of social services to citizens. Meanwhile, a database for the Egyptian family is implemented to support the decision making related to subsidized services.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The initiative guarantees delivery of the services to the underprivileged citizens through a computerized application, up-to-date database, and efficient incurring system. It establishes monitoring, control over the infiltration and loss in supports, and allows creation of a civilized environment through which underprivileged citizens can acquire their services. It achieves transparency through the establishment of clear and neutral processes for acquiring and managing subsidies. The initiative includes building of an integrated family database to support the system together with relevant statistics, which lead to various benefits. Such include availing data, information, and statistics needed to analyze the behavior of the Egyptian families; availing accurate, up-to-date, and timely data and information for future support planning and supporting decision making which targets a better quality of living. Hence, the government can use such database to identify social problems and consequently exert efforts to enforce Egyptian families to change their living style. Such efforts include eradicating illiteracy, and working against unhealthy habits.

The initiative was implemented in phases. Phase 1 consisted of a pilot project in Suez governorate serving about 85000 families in 2005. The system was outsourced, customized, deployed, processes were reviewed and refined and monitored. Resulting savings were around 22% of the total food subsidy for Suez. In Phase 2, 10 governorates were covered by the system, in addition to the social pension service to the smart card. Phase 3, (is the one ongoing right now, covering all Egyptian 29 governorates) should be completely covered by mid 2009.

Moreover, the culture of using smart cards, which is one of the worldwide De facto delivery mechanisms, is expanding in Egypt. Hence, Egypt's technological pointer is subject to improvement.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The Ministry of State for Administrative Development (MSAD) proposed, studied, analyzed, designed, contracted and is currently monitoring the implementation of the initiative. The stakeholders of the initiative include the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MSS), MSAD, , and the Egyptian society.

MSAD has outsourced the contracting approach, for the first time, in the implementation to a Consortium which was responsible for the following:
 Issuance of Smart cards
 Technical support to system programs and applications
 Hosting of family card database
 Availing service provision centers
 Availing call centers
 Applying networks and communication lines
 Training of civil servants responsible for managing the system
 System management
 System execution and maintenance
 Availing of necessary applications and tools (Server and Point of Sale applications and tools)

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The Egyptian government adopted some strategies and objectives to implement the initiative:
1) Outsourcing the implementation, operation, and maintenance of the system.
2) Ensuring that the citizen should not bear any extra costs.
3) Centralizing the design and decentralizing the implementation. The system is designed once and implemented as a pilot, then it is deployed in other governorates in Egypt with little customization according to each governorate requirements.
4) Decentralizing service provision by creating untraditional outlets to fulfill the citizen's needs. Before the initiative, the social pension was delivered to the citizen from the social units only, which lead to long queues and crowdedness. After the implementation of the initiative, other outlets like banks branches, ATM units etc are present to deliver the pension.
5) Applying new methods of management that consider the aspect of efficiency and guarantee the ideal usage of the resources.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The Egyptian government has planned to enlarge and empower the social pension, subsidy of commodities, health insurance, and other services to cover underprivileged families. The family card system is intended to be the vehicle that will lead to that goal. As a key development issue, MSAD has followed the spiral methodology to implement the system development life cycle. Accordingly, the key development and implementation steps were:
1) Establishing an electronic database for Egyptian families including underprivileged families and the transactions performed for each type of service. Each family record in the database is linked to its appropriate support service.
2) Defining the overall system technical architecture, and defining the various technologies and implementation strategies.
3) Preparing the top-level design of the system, and defining the system configuration.
4) Developing, for each service, an application to manage the service database to support provision of the service to the deserved family.
5) Issuing multi application smart cards for services delivery.
6) Building the network infrastructure of the system that allows all stakeholders for the service to communicate together.
7) Building the service centers that will manage the database updates according to predefined rules. It also manages the replacement of the damaged and lost smart cards. A formula defining the number of service centers corresponding to the number of families required to be covered has been proposed and implemented accordingly.
8) Building a call center to receive the citizens' requests and complaints. The call center is equipped with a complaints management system that traces the received complaints until fulfillment.
9) Training the system users, which are the grocers, the supply offices employees, the wholesaler employees, and the service centers staff. The training includes a theoretical and on-the–job training sessions. It covers training on various system applications, besides operational training, system administration training, periodical maintenance procedures, and troubleshooting training.
10) Hardware and Software installation and overall system launching.
11) System testing. Different types of testing have been applied through the lifecycle of the system implementation, namely: Unit tests, program tests, integration tests, performance tests, loading tests, installation tests, acceptance tests, and interoperability tests. As the system has been implemented in phases, new applications should be interoperable with the ones developed and deployed in earlier phases. Finally, as the government plans to allow the system to deliver the social pensions from different outlets, interoperability tests are applied with the ATM units to ensure that the system is ready to use ATM units when needed.
12) In our case, the implementation was broken into 5 phases. Phase 1 started with a pilot in 1 governorate. In phase 2, it was implemented in another 5 governorates, In phase 3, the implementation covered another 10 governorates. In phase 4, 4 other governorates were included, Finally, in phase 5, implementation will cover the remaining 9 governorates. All in all a total of 11.7 million Egyptian families (around 60 million citizens should be covered).

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The initiative has encountered a set of obstacles. One obstacle lies in the culture of the grocer who used to work manually and was quite reluctant to use the automated system. Similarly, the supply office employee who used paper work and having no technical background, represented a challenge to the new system implementation. To overcome such obstacle, two types of training were applied, theoretical and on-the-job training. The objective of the training was to make the employees comfortable with the automated system. However, after studying the cash flow of the traditional process it was calculated that, using the new system the profit of the grocer will be limited to 1.5% only. Thus, to create a win-win case, the government agreed to set incentives for the grocer for each card commodities delivery monthly, hence increasing the grocer’s monthly profit.

Another obstacle lies in the culture of the citizen who used to deal with paper card and may never have dealt with electronic equipment, making it difficult for him/her to get acquainted with the new system. This obstacle has been overcome by setting a simple and clear system interface design. The interface uses codes and numbers rather than commodities names, the process procedure includes a limited number of steps, in addition to preparing a poster describing the process needed by the citizen when s/he receives his/her commodities at the grocer store.

An extra obstacle was how to receive the citizen’s feedback, complaints, and notices. For this specific issue, a dedicated call center has been designed and installed as an integral part of the solution. The phone number of the call center is written on the back of the smart card together with a set of recommendations for the citizen.

Another obstacle related to the citizen, was how to force him/her to keep his/her smart card and PIN number away from the grocer to avoid illegal transactions. This has been solved through setting a media campaign and awareness sessions to work on that.

With reference to the grocery store environment, the Point of Sale (POS) used lies between packs of sugar, oil, flour, and other types of commodities. This can make the POS liable to be intentionally or non-intentionally damaged and broken by the grocer. To overcome this problem, the project team set more tough specifications for the POS design and at the same time, tailored a cover for the POS to protect it from being contaminated.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The Ministry of State has allocated the following four different resources for Administrative Development for the below mentioned purposes:

1) Database Technical Unit (DTU)
It is a unit dedicated to electronic database activities management. The unit is responsible for electronic database design, validation and verification procedures. In addition, the unit proposes and implements the criteria set to link the Family database with other national databases for further validation and verification purposes as well as fulfillment of other citizen support services. Moreover, the unit accepts the final form of the electronic database, defines and manages system lookup tables, and does the appropriate data conversion required for the updating of the smart card system.

2) Distributed Team (DT)
The Distributed Team is a contracted team by the Ministry of State for Administrative Development (MSAD), dedicated to manage the implementation of the Initiative activities amongst different Egyptian governorates. It is responsible for enforcing the initiative regulations and implementations in the governorates described in: follow up of data entry procedures, fulfillment of smart card system service centers, supply offices automation, and groceries automation specifications. Another important responsibility of the DT is ensuring the right and smooth distribution of smart cards to citizens, as well as making sure that the PIN mailer distribution is proceeding correctly. DT sets periodical coordination meetings in MSAD with project managers and their teams to ensure that work flow is proceeding as planned.

3) Family Project Task Force (FPTF)
Family Project Task Force is responsible for DTU supervision, DT follow-up, and ensuring that over all system components are correct. It also manages and ensures the follow up of various system standards, such as: system development life cycle, data entry and conversion procedures, fault resolution and analysis, performance evaluation activities, and smart cards versus PIN
mailer restrictive distribution procedures.

4) Project Management Group (PMG).
PMG is responsible for follow-up of all previously mentioned resources, as well as managing other project procedures ,such as: financial, management, and technical issues. It manages setting incentives, for grocers' and supply office employees for their extra efforts. It manages as well, the contractual aspects of the project.

Concerning the financial resources, the implementation of the initiative was done through complete outsourcing based on per transaction fee model.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The initiative is sustainable and transferable since a set of aspects were taken into consideration before, and during the smart card system implementation.
The first aspect is that the government only pays the running cost of the system. The implementation of the initiative was done through complete outsourcing, thus, the government of Egypt is not the owner of any hardware, call centers, cards…and so on. This model proved to be successful; the annual cost for subsidized food is about 1 Billion Egyptian Pounds and after implementation of the pilot project in one governorate (in Suez), the system resulted in savings of almost 22%. This ensures that government food subsidy reaches targeted families only and the savings are used to increase the food subsidy for those families.
Adding to that, the use of the smart card in other social applications, and the ability to successfully target the under privileged families, makes it quite clear that the return on investment for this system is quite substantial.

The second aspect is the technology itself. By that we mean, the use of multi-application smart cards to add more services over time. In addition to the installation of a backup/alternate site, that allows for system restart if the main location has been failed, damaged or destroyed. System security against unauthorized access takes place through restricting access rights and establishing various protection mechanisms (firewalls,….etc). Other factors are system’s expandability and interoperability. The system is fully fault-tolerant, services are provided by more than one supplier covering geographically all Egypt, and specifications/tests have been developed to ensure interoperability between different suppliers (different smart cards manufacturers but same readers and same art work and logo). The system is also fully documented for sustainability.

The third aspect is the awareness and media campaign stating that the system is targeting all Egyptians.

The fourth aspect is the phased implementation plan of the system. This plan allows the government to monitor the implementation progress, citizen’s reactions, and recover any possible shortcomings.

The system is quite transferable due to its similar implementation in many countries in the region and Africa. At the same time, it is very well documented, its impact can be clearly measured, in addition that it is modular in structure, making its sponsorship much easier.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
There was clearly a number of impacts that can be listed:
1. Reduction of the cost of food subsidy (due to less leakage percentage).
2. Better targeting of underprivileged families (since all relevant data is stored in an electronic database, it was easy to identify them).
3. Better decision making. For example, if statistical data show less tendency to use certain items, other highly demanded items can replace these items.
Major lessons learned can be summarized below:
1) Big projects should start with a pilot project to prove the success of the initiative even if on a smaller scale, to discover problems, rectify them and create a win-win case with all stakeholders.
2) Social considerations of the project should be considered prior to technical aspects. Citizen considerations and requirements should be taken into account from the start before planning and implementation phases.
3) Capacity building of different stakeholders is crucial to the success of the initiative. The initiative covers a training to grocers, supply offices employee's, and service centers employee's
4) Considerable effort is required to change the citizen’s culture to use new technologies for service delivery. Public symposia for each new implemented governorate have been executed, the system has been explained and a round discussion for all the participating entities were conducted.
5) The key performance indicators of the system should be clearly stated and followed up.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   Ministry Of State For Administrative Development
Institution Type:   Government Department  
Contact Person:   Rabab Hassan
Title:   Technical Office Specialist- MSAD  
Telephone/ Fax:   (00202) 24000115
Institution's / Project's Website:   (00202) 24000261
E-mail:   rhassan@ad.gov.eg  
Address:   13 Salah Salem St
Postal Code:   11789
City:   Cairo
State/Province:  
Country:   Egypt

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