KRG announces digital transformation strategy

Dilan Sirwan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - In a bid to transform government services into being more “citizen-centric”, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Region on Wednesday announced the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Digital Transformation Strategy.

The Digital Transformation Strategy which was made public by Prime Minister Masrour Barzani outlines the different steps the government will be taking to ensure that by 2025, “citizens and residents of the Kurdistan Region will have access to simpler, faster, connected, secure and transparent services that are tailored to their needs”.

“By 2025, the Kurdistan Regional Government will be a GovTech powerhouse - ranking as one of the top digital governments in the Middle East and Gulf,” read a statement from the KRG.

“When I became Prime Minister, I mandated the Department of Information Technology (DIT) to lead Kurdistan’s digital transformation. To date this government has invested more than $50 million to bring the KRG into the digital age,” PM Barzani said in a Linkedin article.

According to the premiere, the strategy will not only facilitate how people access government services, but it will also encourage foreign investment and help develop the different sectors of the Region.

 

While the objective is to implement the plan fully in the next three years, the KRG’s DIT has already digitalized a number of government services.

Among the services that have already been digitalized by the KRG are the driving license renewal process and digital company registration system, which the government says has reduced the time needed to register a company from weeks to only 24 hours.

However, those are only part of a chain of systems that the DIT has prepared to launch such as the Kurdistan Financial Management System (KFMS) aimed at centralizing financial units, a digital payroll system, and a citizen complaint system.

Among the most prominent pending works of the DIT would be the Population Information System and the Citizen Application, through which citizens will receive authentic digital IDs, and through the citizen application be able to check their bills and will be able to pay them digitally at a later stage.

According to data published by the KRG, over 2,000 government employees have already been trained to use the KFMS system, and 160 other employees have been trained to use other systems. The latest training sessions ended in July, and more is yet to come.

The latest achievement of the digitalization process was in early September, when Prime Minister Barzani inaugurated the Region’s first data center, a step characterized as “the most vital step towards data sovereignty establishing a top-down approach to data centralization for the first time in the history of the Kurdistan Region,” by the KRG.

Addressing the importance of the process, the head of the DIT in a statement said that “digitalization is not an option; either we adapt now or be condemned to stagnation.”

“Our Digital Transformation Strategy is the first step on the journey to delivering our ambitious vision; it is a blueprint into the future that requires a collective will from stakeholders across the KRG and investment from our international partners,” Hiwa Afandi added.

 

The process that has been ongoing for the past three years and is set to continue for another three years is according to the KRG a product of the work of “a number of Kurdish youth who earned their degrees from the Kurdistan Region’s various universities”.