United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

The financial support project is a government initiative to provide a monthly financial support to Bahraini citizens with limited income. This is part of the Government’s Social plans.
To become eligible for the financial support, citizens were requested to visit a number of Government centers to register for the Financial Support and provide the necessary documentation to provide their eligibility. They also had to provide bank statements to confirm their bank account details for the Government.
As a result, tens of thousands of citizens started going to the centers which created an unexpected overwhelming traffic beyond the Government expectations and forecasts. The traffic created caused different types of challenges for the Government to handle and has caused customer service levels to deteriorate.
Another challenge caused by this traffic was the Government’s capability and readiness to handle and manage the enormous amount of documents provided by citizens to confirm their eligibility resulting in having piles and piles of papers which were almost impossible to manage, and most importantly to judge its authenticity.
The overall situation resulted in an increasing dissatisfaction from citizens and Government leaders and has put a lot of pressure on all the Government entities implementing the project.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
A new Government initiative to rethink of the project implementation and maximize the use of technology and data available in the Government systems started, and was led by eGovernment Authority and the Ministry of Social Development (EGA being the technical owner, while Ministry of Social Development being the business owner). The solution was primarily based on consolidating relevant Government data for citizens in order for the system to judge on the eligibility of citizens based on their household status, income level, commercial activities, and other factors. Then allowing citizens to access the Financial Support Online system to check on their eligibility while advising them on the necessary action in case they were not identified as “Eligible” by the system. This included the automation of the initial registration process, Bank Account confirmation process, and the appeal process. The implemented solution showed a great success from the initial launch, as it processed the financial support to 40,000 citizens directly without a single manual interaction with the Government. This had a huge positive impact on the Government centers as the number of citizens visiting the center slashed by more than 70%. A strong PR/marketing campaign accompanied the launch of the system and communicated its benefits to the citizens inviting them to use it for their applications. The automation of the appeal process (non-eligible citizen applications) was also redesigned, which allowed the Government to better understand all types of appeals, categorizing them and taking specific actions to the diffirent cases and categories of appeal. The information and reports provided to the Government leaders gave them a lot of power to take informative decisions while helped eligible citizens to get the financial support in shorter time (cutting it from 1 year to almost 1 month to many cases).

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The solution was proposed by eGovernment Authority and the Ministry of Social Development jointly and was implemented by the eGovernment Authority internally with the help of its technical partners. The main stakeholders of the project included the following, • Ministry of Finance, • Central Informatics Organization, • Electricity and Water Authority, • Social Insurance Organization Each organization has provided their input to the overall process of the project and provided the relevant data to help in the identification of a citizen status (eligible/not eligible).

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.
After the unpleasant experience of the first phase of the project, The Government realized the strategic importance of revamping the project to ensure it leaves a positive impact in the society and most importantly to the citizens. The main objective for the project was “Provide eligible citizens with the financial support in seamless integrated process which can be fully completed from the comfort of his own home, while providing non eligible citizens with clear status and process to correct the status”. The above statement could only be achieved after all Government Ministries and Organizations participating in this project join forces and unite efforts to better serve the citizens. This was a great success due to the strong political leadership’s direction and the willingness from the organizations.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The solution has been processed with the following stages: 1. Business Process Analysis, In this phase most of the business processes were identified at a high level. The whole business process and procedures of the financial support was documented and modeled. 2. Design, At this stage, the business process gathered along with the financial support requirements were mapped and the strategy of the implementation was proposed, and a simple prototype was provided. 3. Development and data migration, Creation and development of required features as well as the data migration is completed at this stage 4. Integration Utilizing the Governmet integration engine to provide a single view of a citizen from participating Government entities., 5. Testing, Dedicated quality assurance team has verified the completed work at every mile-stone to ensure the integrity and compliance of processes developed and the data analysis cycle. 6. Deployment, Solution has been deployed, features deployed, database configured and at this stage a solution wide testing takes place 7. Operation The final solution helped in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the project operations. This included the eligibility status definition, making payments to eligible citizens, faster analysis of appeal cases, and stopping the financial support for ineligible citizens.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
One of the major challenges faced by the Government in this project was the data consistency and accuracy across the Government systems, and the level of citizen awareness of correcting his own data in the Government System. It was overcome in two ways, 1- A business owner for each data was defined. For example, Martial Status data is the ownership of the Central Informatics Organization, while the Commercial Registration is the ownership of Ministry of Commerce, even though the same data was available at other Government systems. 2- A PR campaign accompanied the project targeting citizens to increase the awareness about their ownership of their data in the Government System. This pushed thousands and thousands of citizens to update their data in the Government systems, including marital status data, properties data, electricity and water records, commercial registration records. The above approach was followed through out the project, not only it helped citizens to get the financial support service easily, but also in increasing the correctness and accuracy of Government data to unmatched levels.

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
Human resources from both business and technical backgrounds from each participating Ministry were directly involved in the project. The eGovernment Authority and Ministry of Social Development project teams were dedicated for the project. There was no capital investment as such in this project, it has utilized existing Government resources to deliver. For example, existing social centers were utilized to receive citizen inquiries. The technical solution was again developed on the existing eGovernment Portal platform utilizing the software and hardware available.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
This initiative not only being sustained, but has become a platform for an end to end social financial system with updated data the gives the Government leadership a clear idea about the latest developments from social and financial aspect to the citizens in Bahrain. The BI reports generated from the system help the Government in its planning process by analyzing trends and understanding the consequences of all surrounding factors. The Government is now planning to build on this system and increase its intelligence to get more information from it and use it to better serve the citizen.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
At first, the project sent a signal to the project team about the size and nature of challenges expected. Those challenges were a great driver to the project team. Leadership commitment, support and followup were of great value through out the project, as they were able to solve many business related problems helping the project team to keep moving and delivering. Strong project team and team work among all participating orgniazations was again a great driver for the success of the project.


Institution Name:		eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
Institution Type:		Government Agency
Contact Person:		Ziad Ismail Asfour
Title:		Assistant Director of Marketing & Awareness
Telephone/ Fax:		+973 17388313, +973 36139308
Institution's / Project's Website:		+973 17388338
E-mail:		zasfour@ega.gov.bh
Address:		Al Barsha Building (Opposite Bahrain International Airport), Building no. 145, Road no. 2403, Block no. 224
Postal Code:		PO Box 75533
City:		Muharraq
State/Province:
Country:		Bahrain

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information