Part 5: Bangladesh’s a2i Program (2019)

By Anir Chowdhury, Policy Advisor and Leader of a2i, Bangladesh, with Melissa-Ann Gillies, Harvard Kennedy School

While a great deal of attention has concentrated on places like the United Kingdom and the United States and the narrative of drawing on talent from Silicon Valley, some of the most interesting and exciting work is being done in emerging economies. Some of these governments have advantages — fewer legacy processes and less existing technology makes it easier to design services — but many have made incredible strides while overcoming resource and talent constraints. More important, these places may be a clearer window into what the future of government looks like as they move ahead quickly.

Indeed, Bangladesh’s a2i program is a shining example of how governments with fewer resources can leverage a lack of existing infrastructure to their advantage to pursue a bold vision and show that digital transformation and a platform-government strategy is available to everyone.

Lessons Learned

This article draws on lessons from Bangladesh to help peers in both emerging and mature markets in relation to:

1. Concentrating resources and prioritizing key infrastructure
2. Shifting the culture with some minor refocusing of public servants
3. Building service delivery infrastructure tailored to your citizens
4. Integrating service delivery and wholesale government
5. Scaling and adapting for the future

It will also explore the conditions that allowed Bangladesh’s model, which involved both kiosks and GaaP, to succeed, though those conditions may not be universal.

Lesson 1: Concentrating Resources and Prioritizing Key Infrastructure

During her 2009 campaign, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, called for a digital transformation of the nation by 2021. After her reelection, she instituted a national ICT policy with a view to achieving middle-income status for Bangladesh by that year, with a special emphasis on the application of digital technologies to realize this vision.

Prior to this, Bangladesh had a limited vision for digital government. As recently as 2007 only 10 percent of civil servants had computers on their desks and most were treated as sacred objects rarely to be used.

As part of the Digital Bangladesh agenda, the government set up its flagship program, a2i, which focuses on the development of digital services, policy reform, supply-side capacity building, and demand-side awareness-generation and incentives for change. It established a whole-of-government partnership across the prime minister’s office, her cabinet, the central Information and Communication Technology Division, and local governments, and was supported by private-sector and NGO development partners. This structure allowed a relatively small team, headed by the government’s chief information officer with strong political support directly from the prime minister’s office, to run programs that touch 43,000 government offices, 70,000 civil servants, and more than 400 government services.

a2i’s mission is twofold. First, to find ways to shift culture and the mindset of political leaders and civil servants from business-as-usual to “leapfrogging” in relation to our digital government agenda. And second, to focus on key leverage points. From 2007 to 2019:

1. The a2i team established a centralized national ID platform for Bangladeshi citizens.
2. With the ID platform as a foundation, the team built out additional platform services such as payments.
3. Leveraging these platform services, it expanded the number of digital services from fewer than 10 to 600 (with a target of 2,874 by 2021).
4. In order to reach citizens, the team opened more than 5,000 one-stop centers for government services (up from one in 2007)
5. Finally, the team consolidated 100 government websites into a single portal.

Alongside the Bangladeshi government’s digital agenda, the economic development, basic literacy, and digital literacy of the Bangladeshi people also leapfrogged from 2007 to 2019.

Lesson 2: Shifting Culture with Some Minor Refocusing of Public Servants

An important part of Bangladesh’s digital journey is how language was used to reframe, develop buy-in, and set up metrics to drive the transformation.

First, the a2i program was about reframing the common goal of digital transformation from “e-governance,” with a strong emphasis on technology, to a narrative around taking government services to citizens’ doorsteps. The concern was that the language of e-governance obscured the core objective of getting services into homes; technology in itself isn’t going to unlock value unless the users want it. Prior to 2009, there was a paradigm in the government that was implicitly, if not explicitly, accepted that citizens could be expected to travel hundreds of miles to the capital to access services. And once there they faced lines of up to 300 people, high transport and meal costs, and expensive overnight stays. Shifting the language away from technology to a common goal of better services for citizens was critical to elevating the importance of the digital transformation.

Second, a2i sought to use language not only to change culture but as a mechanism to build trust and gain the confidence of political leaders and public servants. For example, early in the program, Ani Chowdhury, an a2i policy adviser, ran a day-long workshop for 120 civil servants dedicated to simplifying service delivery. It became clear that attendees were focused primarily on their part of the process (e.g., completing their paper file and sending it to the next person) and were not taking a bird’s eye view. Chowdhury introduced the concept of a “process map” to explore the end-toend process of filing a land application, and the group brainstormed opportunities for process simplification by removing unnecessary steps and delays and consolidating steps. This helped public servants to see the totality of the process as well as to understand the language of process engineering, which was critical to starting them on a journey of reworking processes to make digitization possible.

When the a2i team tried to scale up Chowdhury’s approach, they received feedback that civil servants do not identify with being called a “business.” As a result, the language of “service process simplification” was used to replace “business process engineering.” These shifts in language both allowed new processes and ideas to embed more easily into the public-service context, and gave public servants a greater sense of ownership over the ideas.

Finally, one of the core metrics for the digital transformation was reducing corruption and increasing transparency. However, the language around this problem was not without controversy and created pushback. Some of the resistance came from stakeholders who may have been partaking in corrupt practices; but some also came from stakeholders who were both concerned about being held accountable to metrics over which they may have limited control, but that might depict them as corrupt. In addition, they were also concerned that emphasizing corruption reinforced a negative narrative about the public service. As a result, rather than emphasize corruption explicitly, a2i focused on determining a baseline of “time, cost, visit” (TCV), which measures government services at the citizen’s doorstep, is tied to service process simplification, and has the side benefit of indirectly tackling corruption since shady practices might negatively impact the TCV.

Lesson 3: Building Service-Delivery Infrastructure Tailored to Citizens

One challenge in Bangladesh around digital transformation is that a large number of citizens have either limited or no access to the internet, or are not literate. In 2017, there was no infrastructure for service delivery, and mobile ownership 2G coverage, and digital literacy were limited. Digitizing government at services at scale simply cannot be citizen-centric if citizens have no way of accessing those services.

To solve this problem the a2i team realized its digital services could still help the program achieve scale and impact, not by serving citizens directly, but by lowering the cost of intermediaries. In Bangladesh, this involved setting up more than 5,000 franchised kiosks to support 5 to 6 million citizens a month to receive more than 150 digital services.

The a2i program began to roll out one-stop shops to reduce corruption as well as the distance citizens must travel to receive government services. It applied three principles:

1. Digital centers should be established in rural areas first and, if possible, located in government offices. The most marginalized citizens and the most corruption were in rural areas, where infrastructure was historically weakest.
2. Digital centers should be run not by government officers but by private entrepreneurs who would sell government services to citizens for a fee. This faced a lot of opposition, but encouraged innovation in service delivery and allowed citizens to access more services by quickly scaling service desks within thousands of private stores across Bangladesh.
3. Digital centers should achieve gender parity in their hiring for customer service roles, because female customers are more comfortable with female sales representatives.

These centers were a bridge between citizens and government services while digital literacy remained low in Bangladesh. They provide one-stop shopping for 150 digital services, including 70 public services and 80 private services, including banking, e-commerce, and online ticket sales. This would not be possible without the public-private-partnerships.

Lesson 4: Integrating Service Delivery and Wholesale Government

The a2i team designed and built an integrated service delivery platform for shared services, including the capability for individual government departments to build additional services themselves. The core infrastructure includes:

1. ID — birth certificates, death certificates, national ID, education, health and agriculture
2. Services — notifications, e-File, government enterprise resource planning, national portal, grievant redress
3. Data — open government data, Sustainable Development Goals tracker, agency registries
4. Payments — government to person (G2P), person to government (P2G), government receipt generator

Establishing a core infrastructure has made it a lot cheaper and easier for entrepreneurs to add new services — both government and nongovernment — to the platform, which is consistent and inoperable. The platform also means that there is more competition among entrepreneurs to provide government services more efficiently and to provide additional services.

A lot of hard work went into establishing these canonical data sources and building a few shared components, such as the single login and payments system, but it has set up the foundations for better integrated service delivery in the future.

Lesson 5: Scaling and Adapting for the Future

By combining a digital platform infrastructure with a kiosk network, Bangladesh has created a hyper-efficient way to deliver and scale services to it citizens. This approach has several advantages.

First, by building out a set of core government-platform services, a2i can:

• Dramatically lower the cost of deploying new services or digitizing existing current services
• Build out digital services well before citizens are able to consume them directly themselves
• Iterate and adapt these services over time

In short, the platform approach lowers the cost of developing and enhancing the kiosk network, and the franchise kiosk network approach then has complementary advantages. Specifically, as literacy rates and internet access improve, the kiosks:

• Give a2i access to a group of “advanced” users — the private-sector kiosk operators — who can test services for usability today in preparation for tomorrow’s end users
• Allow a2i to move services from being kiosk-only to online generally as they become simpler to use and internet access improves
• Allow a2i to avoid “lock-in” risks from potentially eliminating kiosks in the future if mobile online services become sufficiently available

Special Conditions

Bangladesh’s success story did not happen overnight. It is the culmination of more than a decade of hard work. That said, there are real lessons other governments, both in emerging and mature markets, can draw from its challenges and successes. A few special conditions that may not be universal allowed Bangladesh’s dual kiosk and GaaP to succeed, including:

1. A strong political vision for “digital leapfrogging” from the prime minister following her 2009 announcement of Digital Bangladesh.
2. Almost zero traditional legacy systems to protect — a benefit for the really new kids on the digital block.
3. Unfettered opportunity to leapfrog other economies by learning from international GaaP best practices and guidance from global experts.
4. And finally, access to risk capital from an innovation fund committed to the belief that Bangladesh has nowhere to go but up.

Conclusion

The story of Bangladesh’s a2i program is a shining light for both mature and less mature economies. It is an example of how the government and public sector can turn their perceived weaknesses — such as fewer legacy processes and existing technology — into advantages and become an example for advanced developed economies. Its focus on shifting culture and language to emphasize bringing government services to citizens has allowed it to progress quickly. The Bangladeshi model involves building service-delivery infrastructure tailored to citizens’ burgeoning levels of digital maturity, integrating service delivery and wholesale government to expand both government and private services, and focusing on scalable and adaptable platforms for the future. While it is almost too easy to look toward the Bangladesh story as a playbook for the future, it is also important to consider the special conditions that made it possible for Bangladesh’s system to succeed.