Transforming institutions for inclusive services and human development in Albania

Results Highlights

• Effective and Inclusive Institutions. More effective and inclusive institutions are improving services for all, preparing the next generation for the job market, and boosting human and economic development.
• Service Usage. By 2025, service applications completed through the e-Albania portal and mobile application rose by 40 percent. By 2029 the use of these tools is expected to increase usage of digitally enabled services by the general population by 60%, and by vulnerable groups, such as the poor, elderly, disabled, and women by +15%.
• Service Quality. By 2025, new service standards to improve service quality have been designed, adopted, and rolled out for selected services. By 2029, the expected results are: reduced time to deliver services by 20 percent and 90 percent of users “highly satisfied” with digital services.
• Human Development. By 2025, 216 Education SmartLabs were established, and five Youth Innovation Centers were designed to train youth. By 2029, 35,000 primary school students are expected to have improved their digital and numeracy skills, while 4,000 youth will have improved their digital skills for the digital economy job market.
• Local Government Modernization. By 2025, priority local services have been identified, and an inter-institutional working group has been established to oversee the modernization of local government services. By 2029, 10 priority services for citizens and businesses – covering 61 municipalities – will be transformed into e-services and municipalities will increase the transparency and efficiency of local investments for sustainable development.

Challenge

The government of Albania has adopted an ambitious institutional reform program under its National Strategy for Development and European Integration (2022-2030). The program aims to improve public sector efficiency, improved public services, and boost human and economic development. While significant progress has already been made, more work is needed to:

• Enhance the usage and quality of digital services to improve the use-friendliness, speed and efficiency of service delivery.
• Harness new teaching and digital tools to improve human development services, such as in primary education and vocational skills.
• Improve access to, and usage of, digital services by vulnerable groups affected by the digital divide, such as the elderly and disabled.
• Improve local government systems and capacity to deliver fast and efficient services.
• Further modernize public procurement and financial management, using the latest technologies, to increase economic returns, efficiency, and transparency.

Approach

To address these development challenges, the World Bank has committed $145 million in an innovative Program for Results (PforR), Improving Equitable Access to High Standard Public Services through GovTech. The PforR aims to improve the equitable access to, and quality of, public services for citizens and businesses by combining public administration reform with behavior change strategies and the application of relevant digital technologies to make government processes faster, more efficient, more transparent, and more oriented to user needs.  To do so, the project focuses on four key results areas and related activities: (i) Enhancing the usage and quality of digitally enabled services, which will upgrade the e-services portal (e-Albania) and make services easier and faster to use by clustering services into key life events such as “the birth of a child” or “opening a new business”; (ii) Improving human capital and ensuring inclusion, which will put in place SmartLabs in primary schools to provide access to new learning content and tools for digital, numeracy and literacy, and set up Youth Innovation Centers to train youth in digital skills and provide face-to-face support for vulnerable groups; (iii) Strengthening institutional enablers of an efficient public sector, which will improve government data sharing systems in government back-offices to facilitate a quicker and more efficient delivery of services to citizens and businesses; and, (iv) Modernizing and digitizing local government services, which will reform and simplify the way priority services are delivered to citizens (such as for local construction and local agriculture) and digitize local government functions.

Results

The program contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals related to: (i) No Poverty; (ii) Quality Education; and (iii) Climate Action. It contributes directly to the World Bank Corporate Scorecard Results focused on: (i) People using digitally enabled services; (ii) Students supported with better education; and (iii) Beneficiaries with enhanced resilience to climate risks.

The Improving Equitable Access to High Standard Public Services through GovTech Program for Results, launched in 2023, has made strides toward the overarching goals of enhancing digital public services, advancing inclusion, and using digital tools to build human capital by mid-2025. 

The quality of digitally enabled services has improved, accompanied by increased service usage. Notably, service applications completed through the e-Albania portal and mobile application rose by 40 percent. The launch of the redesigned e-Albania 2.0 aimed to enhance accessibility, including for persons with disabilities, while newly adopted digital service standards have been rolled out to further strengthen service quality. 

To boost human capital and promote inclusion, 216 Education SmartLabs were established in primary schools, which is expected to enable 35,000 children to access modern learning tools by 2029, while equipping teachers with digital skills. In parallel, five Youth Innovation Centers have been designed and are set to become operational by 2025, providing young people with skills relevant to the job market. Institutional enablers of efficient public sector service delivery have also been strengthened.

To strengthen institutional enablers of an efficient public sector, the Open Data Portal has been upgraded to enhance user experience and align with international best practices for open data. Additionally, the Government Gateway—the digital platform for inter-agency data sharing to support public service delivery—has begun a major upgrade to improve its functionality and reach.

At the local level, efforts to modernize and digitize government services are underway. The government identified critical local services for improvement, completed a digital readiness assessment of local government institutions, and established an inter-institutional working group to guide the transformation of local governments for the future.

By program close in 2029, the program expects to benefit more than 3 million users through enhancements to e-Albania 2.0, re-engineering and digitalizing priority services for e-Albania 2.0, making them more user-friendly, and upgrading local governments' digital infrastructure, amongst other. Expected enhancements include improving efficiency for more than 2 million yearly applications, reducing service delivery processing time by 20 percent, and achieving at least 90 percent of “highly satisfied” users. It also expects to: (i) improve access to digital services for vulnerable groups, such as the disabled and elderly; (ii) teach digital, numeracy, and literacy skills to 35,000 children while training more than 1,000 teachers and school principals; (iii) equip 4,000 youth with digital skills for the job market; (iv) increase the usage of Open Data to improve accountability; (v) enhance efficient in public procurement using AI; and, (vi) and improve public spending through a new financial management system. By achieving these results, the program is expected to contribute to improved lifetime earnings for program beneficiaries, to considerable savings and productivity gains for public administration, and to overall economic benefits through improved human capital.

Digital services help all citizens, including the most vulnerable, access public services easier and faster. Photo: Gent Shkullaku

World Bank Group Contribution 

The World Bank’s support to the reform agenda is largely through the $135 million PforR instrument. In addition, to build government capacity to achieve ambitious results, the World Bank has also provided $10 million for technical assistance through the Investment Project Financing (IPF) instrument.

Partnerships

External partnerships and collaboration are also fundamental to the current and expected results. Key partners have provided financing and technical assistance to improve the design and implementation of the program, to foster and scale innovations, and to mainstream climate-resilience into the design and implementation. These partners are: the Japanese-financed Quality Infrastructure Investment (QII) program; the Austrian Ministry of Finance Department of International Affairs;  the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO); and the Austrian-financed Western Balkans Climate-Support Facility (CSF).

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, it is expected that the program would be further scaled up to include investments in local economic development: improving local infrastructure projects and building local partnerships with the private sector for job creation. Two key lessons have been learned to date. First, digital tools are necessary but not sufficient to bring about an impact—they need to be combined with public administration reforms and behavior change strategies. Second, inter-institutional coordination between the government digital agency and the line ministries is absolutely essential to bring about results.