On Tuesday 25 January 2022, a ministerial delegation led by Mrs Aurelie ADAM SOULE ZOUMAROU, Minister of Digital Affairs and Digitalisation, visited the back-office facilities for the criminal record, nationality certificate and building permit e-services, delivered through the official public administration website, “Service-Public.bj”. The tour took the delegation to the Cotonou Court of First Instance and to the Legal and Land Affairs Department of Cotonou City Hall.
On Tuesday 25 January 2022, a ministerial delegation led by Mrs Aurelie ADAM SOULE ZOUMAROU, Minister of Digital Affairs and Digitalisation, visited the back-office facilities for the criminal record, nationality certificate and building permit e-services, delivered through the official public administration website, “Service-Public.bj”. The tour took the delegation to the Cotonou Court of First Instance and to the Legal and Land Affairs Department of Cotonou City Hall.
As part of the implementation of smart administration (Smart Gouv), a flagship project of President Patrice Talon’s Government Action Programme, several public services have been digitised to make life easier for citizens and businesses. In this spirit, since the launch in March 2020 of the National Public Services Portal, available at www.service-public.bj, citizens can access information on 786 public administration services and use 119 e-services, 45 of which are fully digitised (application, processing, payment and delivery).
When a citizen applies for a public service online via the “Service-Public.bj” web platform, public administration staff trained for the purpose receive the request, process it and deliver the service. These are the back-office staff. The visit to these public administration staff enabled the Minister of Digital Affairs and Digitalisation to gain first-hand knowledge of their working conditions and to hear their concerns with a view to continuous improvement.
Back offices for the nationality certificate and criminal record e-services
A working session was held at the Cotonou Court of First Instance with the teams in charge of the criminal record and nationality certificate e-services, in the presence of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Minister of Justice and Legislation, Mr Gilbert TOGBONON, and the President of the Cotonou Court of First Instance, Mr Victor FATINDE. This was followed by the actual visit to the back offices of the two e-services. At each stage, discussions focused on improving the process to avoid late delivery of documents to applicants and on managing peaks in demand, particularly when competitive examinations are announced.
The e-criminal record has had a very positive impact on citizens, as they no longer need to travel to their municipality of birth to apply for and obtain this document.
More than 130,000 applications have been received online and processed by officials since its launch on 29 July 2020.
Back office for the building permit e-service
Alongside her colleague Mr Raphael AKOTEGNON, Minister of Decentralisation and Local Governance, the Prefect of the Littoral department, Mr Alain OROUNLA, and the Mayor of the city of Cotonou, Mr Luc ATROKPO, the Minister of Digital Affairs and Digitalisation visited the back office of the building permit e-service. Launched before the national public services portal, via the permisdeconstruire.gouv.bj platform, this first version only allowed applications to be made online.
The national public services portal, service-public.bj, made it possible to launch a more complete version allowing online payment and delivery. Today, building permit applications for the municipality of Cotonou are made exclusively online. It should also be noted that digitisation has considerably reduced the time taken to deliver this public service, from 45 days to 14 days at most. The teams are very pleased with the streamlining of the process and the resulting traceability. Steps will be taken to address the concerns raised by staff.
All in all, the visit made it possible to assess the impact of digitisation on the work of the specialist staff to whom the online applications made by public administration users are assigned. The back-office staff’s requests were noted with a view to further improving their working conditions.