For years, the residents of Prishtina (the Republic of Kosovo) have faced the problem of waiting in long and slow queues to receive a document from the Civil State Registry, property tax and cadastre departments. The long queues would frequently lead to corruption, inappropriate behaviours of the personnel or citizens, or the uneasiness of both parties. As a result of these challenges, the project ‘E-kiosk’ aimed at creating a digital self-service system of acquiring documents digitally from the Civil State Registry. On 11 June 2015 (the day of Prishtina’s Liberation anniversary), the Municipality of Prishtina promoted the e-kiosk project, which has drawn extraordinary interest.
The types of documents that can be acquired with this automated system are a birth certificate extract, birth certificate, marriage certificate, state certificate and residence certificate. These documents cover 85% of the general citizens’ requests in the Municipality of Prishtina. Assessing the facility, the e-kiosk has provided the means to do the work of the Municipality of Prishtina, in its third year of building system stability as the project started adding services to ease the citizens’ lives, noticeably valuing and saving them time.
The added services are printing the property tax bill, paying the property tax bill and printing a property certificate. The system is almost identical to the ATM machines of financial systems. Without contact with the official, with a simple scanning of the identification document (ID or passport, with a simple paying method (very similar to the one at the counters) – in only 30 seconds the citizen can have the wanted document or service).
The process is entirely digitised and functions 24/7. Citizen identification is made using the ID personal number from their ID (simple or biometric) or the citizens’ passport. A web service was created to verify the personal number of the citizen and communicate with the main database of the Civil Registry Agency. It was built using the programming language .NET, but can be integrated into any platform. The automatic digital system of receiving the document from the civil status, property tax and cadastre departments is a multilingual system (Albanian, Serbian and English), with a high level of security of the document and physical security.
Considering that this service was an innovation in the sphere of offerings towards citizens, the expectations of the Municipality of Prishtina were not as high as the results achieved. Since the eighth month of the implementation of the e-kiosk, it had already returned the amount of money spent on bringing this project to life. The interest of the citizens in acquiring documents or using a service using e-kiosk was greater than anticipated, reaching 500 uses per day.
The main goal of implementing this project was keeping citizens out of the municipality’s building and counters, and keeping the services available even after working hours. This goal was fully implemented, and has resulted in these service elements:
- services without contact with officials;
- services received in 30 seconds;
- payments made in the same amount as on the counters;
- safe documents, certified and recognised by the embassies and the EU;
- safe access, monitored by four external cameras and one internal camera;
- a 24-hour service, seven days a week;
- service with no chance of corruption.