Currently 41.8 % of the Albanian population are currently living in rural area. While the population of the rural areas faced and often continues to face similar challenges regarding the missing implementation of quality and standards for public services as the rest of the Albanian population, there is a number of factors which make this part of the population even more vulnerable with regard to public services:
- Offices offering public services within the rural area are generally very scattered within the rural and mountainous areas of the country, making for long distances to be covered often multiple times per case.
- There is little to no public transport available in many of the regions. This means population has to rely on private transport to which not everyone has access
- Streets outside of cities are often not properly maintained, adding additional difficulties in accessing public services
- There is a number of online public services available but it still does not cover all the needs and is not always functional
- Generally speaking, internet connection outside of cities is less reliable posing an additional obstacle for the rural population
- Both IT ownership and IT literacy in rural areas is considerably lower than in cities, with the effect that even online services that are theoretically offered can not be accessed by the entire population.
In Albania, remote rural area population faces many difficulties in accessing public services due to the lack of public administration offices, which are not expanded in the whole Albanian territory. Thus, rural regions face a particular challenge in the form of relatively high costs of service delivery regarding a number of factors, mainly:
- lower density populations;
- larger distances that have to be traveled by service users and service providers;
- Small numbers of people in any location that preclude economies of scale.
In fact, the issue of solving the problems in rural area with a focus on public services had been pending for a long period, because a lack of attention has dominated in the past against the needs of marginalized and rural population and against innovative solutions to improve public services and with the adoption of European standards.
The improvement of public services based on innovative solutions, supported by modern infrastructure will facilitate citizen access, reduce distances, and will improve citizen assistance in rural areas as well as minimize the difficulties associated with limited IT literacy and internet access in rural populations. Following the above, the government has pursued a path breaking reform that reinvents the way the public administration delivers services to its citizens, which relies heavily on innovation and the use of information technology to improve standards, procedures, and the organization of service delivery.
Despite the fact that ADISA has already deployed a variety of channels for service delivery
- 6 (six) Citizen Service Centres (CSC);
- two collocations,
- a Call Centre;
- a mobile application
- an email address (informacion@adisa.gov.al)),
- Citizen Spot – A dedicated counter for people to use e-services
- Information packages for life events
ADISA Lab extended its attention to people in rural areas, as the big challenge was the difficulty on accessing basic public services, for 41.8 % of the Albanian population living in rural area.
In fact, the e-mail address of ADISA (informacion@adisa.gov.al) and the governmental portal e-Albania (e-albania.al) can theoretically be reached from everywhere, but in practice, not every public service can be secured online, while at the same time a fair portion of population is not familiar with using online services. They would definitely need the person-to-person communication. Setting up stationary service centres on the other hand is not realistic: time and heavy investment would be required, which is not possible for the moment.
Under the circumstances, ADISA had to find an innovative solution to improve public service delivery and offer accessibility to services for rural area population. This project aims to improve public services based on innovative solutions, supported by modern infrastructure that will facilitate citizen access, reduce distances, improve citizen assistance in rural areas and minimize the internet access difficulties.