Ahmed Samy – Managing Director of HP Egypt
We know Dr. Ahmed Darwish Minister of State for Administrative Development. Dr. Darwish is not new to our community. Dr. Darwish actually asked me to be very brief in introducing him so I will try to do so. Dr. Darwish was born in Egypt in 1959, received his bachelor of science in Electric and Communication Engineering and his master in Computer Engineering from Cairo University, 1981 and 1984 respectively. And then he received his Phd. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1988. Then Dr. Darwish joined Cairo University as a professor until year 2004. Dr. Darwish was a consultant to a number of international organizations including UNESCO, FAO, ESCWA, United Nation. In the past few years and prior to becoming Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Darwish acting as the e-government program director at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. He led the team to prepare the national project document on e-government and coordination and implementation of such project. Today Dr. Darwish will talk to us on the new challenge for service delivery. What I mentioned most of know but some of us might not know that Dr. Darwish is a very cultured person. He loves arts, classic music, and also he’s a football player. So please join me with a warm welcome to Dr. Darwish.

Dr. Darwish
Thank you very much Ahmed for this introduction. Thanks to AmCham for this beautiful morning. It must be beautiful morning actually to start with breakfast with someone. To you, [this] might be something; but to me, this is the world. Thank you very much. First observation, before I start is that this is the second time I get invited as a breakfast guest speaker. I understand that other people get invited to be lunch guest speakers; so I’m just wondering if what I’m saying is a little hard to digest after a big meal so I’m always invited to breakfast. But anyway, I’ll try not to be so heavy on your stomach. I know that I have agreed with Ahmed to talk about the new channels of service delivery and that’s what I’m going to do. But I couldn’t actually pass this opportunity with this elite company to touch on two more programs within the e-government to tell you about.

What I intend to do actually is … you always talk spoke about the government being accountable. I was going to give you sort of a classic talk a few minutes without any slides. But I said, if we talk about accountability and I’m actually the Chairman of the Transparency and Integrity Committee then I should give you numbers in order to say [whether] we did deliver what we promised or not. When we started our e-government program in July 2007 Phase I ended actually with the original documents ended June 30, 2007. In this document, we promised few things and we actually delivered 95 percent of what we promised and I think it was among the highest achievement rates in any government documents. The reason is we were very reasonable is we did not try to promise what we would not be able to deliver. We concentrated very much on strategic plans and sort of planting culture in some pilot projects and so on. Now, we’re living Phase II, which is the second document 7/12 and this is a serious one because we would like to have what you call deployment, whether it is geographic on services and so on.

Here is our first progress that we have made during Phase I. I don’t want actually to say that we were sort of measuring ourselves but I got you measure an outside source. This is the United Nations Report on Readiness that comes out of the Public Access Network of the United Nations. And we started four behind on the scale. They usually rank 192 countries and the report comes out periodically. We came from 162 on our web measure or e-government services or services on the web until we reach this year and we ranked 28 out of 192. First time we [make] the Honor List which is the top 35. The other thing I’d like to point our attention to is that our Participation Index is not bad either because we rank 49th. The Participation Index is how the public is interacting with those electronic services. So like three quarters of the world is behind us. These services are new so let’s not be very hard on ourselves. We’ve achieved something we’re doing well and the reason for that is that we’re taking some bold steps. You know, the world is complementing us, for example, on the fact that we were the first country ever to do cash on delivery for government services. I mean no one every thought that this is something commercial companies would do—they want to market their products, say I’ll deliver to your home and if you like it you’ll pay to the post man. This is the first time. We, for us, it’s a case study that everyone’s talking about. We have extended the bridge of trust. Say the government trusts you, go on the internet, tell me about the service you’d like, I will finish the document, send it to your home, and you pay later. So this is the bridging of trust. As I’ve mentioned actually the e-government had three programs. The one I promised to [talk] about most today is the new channels of service delivery but I will also touch base quickly on the two others, which are the Enterprise Resource Planning and the National Databases.

Under services we had so tough a vision or objective that we would like to deliver the service to the people wherever they are, when they need it, at their convenience, at the appropriate time, accurate enough. They don’t have to come to me, we will go to them. The slogan was, the government now delivers. We deliver. People were asking why can I pick up the phone and order my fast food order my sandwich and this government is not capable of delivering services to me. So this is what we thought about. Services could be delivered thought the internet, through phones, [and] through service providers. Now, we have over the internet available around 80 services or so. We started phone services. I’m going to talk about that. Now you can call 16633. Somebody will take your order and deliver the government service to you. We’re also soon… shortly, we will be delivering services over mobile. Mobile is a great tool and channel for delivering services. It also includes the payment facility.

That does not mean the window is going away. True we have closed the window for some of our services such as the QIZ and the university enrollment. But window services are likely to stay with us for 10 more years. So we are working also on simplifying services through the windows.

Here is the accountability. We currently have 87 services available on the internet that you can order them. Our target by 2012 is 198, almost 200 services. That will cover all of the most used services by citizens and investors. We also have some sort of what you call level I service which we avail the form and the procedures that are needed. So it saves you an errand. You don’t have to ask questions, you can go and download the form and be ready. It tells you all the supporting documents you need – it tells you the fees, where you can get the services and so on. So we’ve created an inquiry service that is useful. That’s of course on, let me go back, the site is www.egypt.gov.eg, www.masr.gov.eg or www.misr.gov.eg.

On the same tone or frequency I’d like to highlight two more tools that we are proud of. That’s www.investment.gov.eg, it’s currently available in four languages and we’ve got excellent reviews on it. The small and medium size portable which is www.business.gov.eg, carries information from 213 government entities and the nice thing about it is that small and medium enterprise are likely to sort of pick up on and elevate the economy of this country but unfortunately they don’t have someone to pamper them like GAFI, the General Authority for Investment, does for big investors. So we need actually to give them more attention. And this website takes them through the whole story, form starting to think about their project into how to form a company how to deal with taxes, how to deal with your accounting systems and so on.

Regarding call centers, a few years ago we have actually created 19 gov service. This is sort of an inquiry, suggest and complain. It’s different from the 16633 service I talked about. This one does not provide services but this is like you know, our CRM. And fortunately customers and citizens they both start with a C, so it’s our Citizen Relationship Management. The Citizen Relationship Management in e-government is a big thing that we have established with 11 entities up to now. Every call, ever letter, every fax, every walk-in, complainer, or suggestion gets registered in that database and it gets followed up. Some of those are personal complaints so we follow them on a case by case basis and we call them back or we send them a letter back. But some of them are just generic complaints that help us do statistics and form things. We started actually, for example, with awareness of the fact to get the Egyptian to fight their rights. Why don’t you report corruption, why don’t you report bribery? This is going to take off soon so I’m giving you a glimpse of what will be coming next.

But my two hopes actually, that I talked about in the first document when Dr. Nazif fortunately asked me to lead the team to write the original document on e-government in October 2005 is the services providers. This is the next wave that is going to get the e-government everywhere. Let’s agree that even with 10 percent internet penetration, even with those that have computers and internet and so on, we’re not going to reach everyone. We still have 29 percent illiteracy rate. That’s something I’d like to talk about at the end of my slides if I have time. So how we are going to get services to everyone? We get it through brokers, through service providers. Egyptians have been used to service providers for a long time. Most of us actually have asked a friend or a driver or an employee or even a professional laborer in order to get his stuff done. Why don’t we actually sport of distribute that. We currently have 500 of these that belong to the Ministry, 200 post offices and 150 that belong to the private sector. But actually what I would like to see is 5,000 of these, I’d like to see one in every village in Egypt. We have 4,600 villages in Egypt. I’m not asking too much. I need two young people in every village with a computer and a phone line and they could provide services too the whole village. For a nominal fee, one or two pounds, and people will think once or twice and they will recognize that in order to leave my village and go to the headquarters of the governorates I’m losing two days and I’m paying around 20 pounds or whatever in transportation. If this guy is charging him only two pounds it might be lucrative to them and there is a business model there. And this is going to be what gets the e-government everywhere, those service providers. We started actually a project with Tamima and the National Bank of Egypt and we’d like to see this franchised all over Egypt.

The last half our channels is the classic window service. We are doing something to our classic window service? Yes we are doing. We are starting with the municipalities because many municipalities are the most painful experience to most of the citizens. We have already done 25 of these. But the target is 288, so it is, we are working on something. I promised you to do accountability, so for example, I could tell you when we have already done 19 of the Department of Motor Vehicles where you go and renew your car license and so on, and the target is 139. The thing is that we’ve got the wheel rolling and we have the momentum now and I think what we’re promising I’m very optimistic that it will get done during the next period.

Here are the numbers in front of you, and maybe I would like to take a few minutes actually to talk about the two programs that were not planned but I thought to give you a glimpse of. The second program within our e-government is the Enterprise Resource Planning Program, which all that it goes on in the back office of the government. Accounting systems, archiving, procurement, general ledger, you name it, payroll and so on. And we have embarked on a very ambitious plan we’d like, actually, to automate in Egypt. We have the archiving and electronic exchange installed in 47, I think this is wrong, it’s probably 60 something if Ahmed Samir, can correct me, that’s an old slide. But anyway, we have done something. This e-participation and our ranking on the United Nations Report does not come from not measuring things. The report is not a perception report, that’s not a perception index. They do measure things. So one thing that we have on our side is that we have document, electronic document exchange, between all Ministries and the Cabinet Secretariat with the Prime Minister. We don’t send papers. I don’t send a memo to Dr. Nazif in a paper form anymore. We stopped the paper circulation between Ministries and the Cabinet Secretariat on August 8th of last year. Something like eight, nine months ago. We had the system on for a year and a half, it’s a private network, encrypted and we trust the system now so we stopped the paper one and we are only exchanging electronic documents.

Another thing that I think that is going to change the face of the economy in Egypt is actually we are producing or giving salary or wage cards to our government employees. We have covered now 270,000 of them. The card could be used in ATM but it could also be the Visa or Mastercard or whatever card so that will help in creating sort of a different culture to people in government. The target here is six million, but this is something that is not in our hand. By the way, we are ready to do much more than that. In fact I have a long waiting list for government employees or government entities that wish to move to payment cards but we cannot actually do them because of, we are currently exceeding the international normal ratio of customers to ATM machines. We started to see lines, we started to see people going to ATM machines and the machines say sorry, we don’t have cash, and so on. So until banks help us a little bit with that we’ll not be able to expand on this project. So the limiting factor is how many ATM machines.

Dr. Yousef actually has through a public private partnership is sort of pushing things to happen. So he’s purchasing 1000 ATM machines in order to add to the number of ATM machines in Egypt. But probably we need another 2000 in addition to the 1000 that Dr. Youseff is purchasing. When it comes to procurement something very important is going to happen in Egypt soon. We have already a procurement portal at etender.gov.eg. And three Ministries are subscribing to that. Soon by the end of the year it’s not only going to be announcements of tenders and requests for proposals and so on, but it will also be applying. So you can apply online to government tenders. The promise is that by 2012 this is going to be mandatory. The government cannot do any procurement except over that site. This actually will help enhance our transparency index very much and will also be very efficient in terms of group discounts and so on.

The last program in a quick nutshell is the establishing and integration of the national database. Some of these databases have a social outcome. For example, like the family database, we have now 11 million families registered on our database; 2.5 million of these families already have a family card. It’s a SIM-based card. They can get food subsidies on it; they can get cash payments on it and soon they will get their health insurance benefits over that card. The card is equipped to have eight applications so we can have more expansion coming to that. This way we could actually start Phase II, which is what Dr. Moselhi has started, which is the specific profile of each family. He’s already done that for Sharkqiya and Assiut. And he’s working on the rest of the governorates. So I could start targeting each family with the right package. This is going to be the right start to a good and efficient social safety net.

But also within the program we do other things like you know getting government to talk to each other. And this became a reality. I remember when I started to write the document, I am talking about in year 2000 when we actually came to that part about linking government entities and getting government entities to talk to each other. I used the following term to Dr. Nazif. I told him I’m writing two statements about that despite the fact that I believe it is science fiction, you know, to get government to talk to each other, but we’re are now in a position actually of doing that. I’ll give you an example. We started to get the Minister of Education to talk to the civil social organizations here that are responsible for our national Id database. It’s very simple. Egypt’s main problem is actually illiteracy. Our human resources problem. If I can go back on, I’m not sure how I can go back on this thing, it’s not going. Oh wait. Ok. It doesn’t go backward. Look at this one.

We rank 28 on our e-government program. But we rank 129 on our human capital. This is Egypt’s true problem, our human resources. Despite this is our true wealth, you know, you could think of it in two ways. Illiteracy is 29 percent our educational product does not match the market skills. Let’s take illiteracy in the first place. With all due respect to the programs where we’re trying to education adults to read and write, I think the solution will be actually to close the source the tap from down there. So we would like to make sure that every kid who is born in this country is getting education. The Ministry of Education has a database that tells you who are the kids that are in school. The CSO has a national ID database that tells you who was born. It’s very simple. Those who are on the CSO database and they are not at the Ministry of Education, those are street kids. Those are kids who are not getting education. We should go and find these boys and girls. If they are poor we should pay them money. This is the best investment ever Egypt will pay. Even if it costs LE 2 billion. If parents are separated, let’s look for a social solution for that. But this is the true investment that we have to do for our young people.

Some of these databases have an economic return. Something like the real estate registration. This is dead wealth. Less than 1/5 of real estate in Egypt is registered. It is not registered it means it does not circulate in our economy. Someone who has a workshop, Smith for example, and he wants to buy a new machine, he goes to the bank and says “I want to get a loan for 25 thousand pounds.” They will ask him for a loan guarantee. He cannot produce a document that says that this workshop is owned his family for ages. The bank will not give him a loan. Should he have gotten this loan he would have bought his machinery and hired two more people. So it would help actually in this economy. So, by the way, it has nothing to do with the real estate tax, because we get real estate tax whether the property is registered or not. We’re not doing this for real estate tax. We’re doing this to help the economy. This is the summary of our, what we have been doing with our national databases, what I talked about the family database and the linking of the education and what we’re targeting. We currently have under development 1.2 million units but we’re targeting 28 million units for the real estate registration. I’d like to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to address you this afternoon. This is our checklist and I’d be more than happy actually to answer your questions and take your comments and suggestions. They are very valuable to us in order to rectify our track. Thank you very much.

We’ll take a few questions from the floor. So I believe there is a mike out there, so if you have a question please stand up and ask your question.

Well, I believe it was comprehensive. All right, question out there.

Question 1 Hi. My name is Jennifer Bremmer, I’m with the American University in Cairo. We’re doing some work in local government so I’ve had occasion to look at many of the websites of the government and I really appreciate all the work that you’re doing and it’s clearly made a great deal of progress. But still there seems to be a problem in updating websites. People establish a website but then when you go back the information is not being updated or it seems frankly to be more promotional rather than informational so it has history but it doesn’t really provide much in the way of data or information on things like the government budget or that type of information. So I’m wondering whether there’s something that can be done to encourage more updating and more utility to the websites. Thank you.

Dr. Darwish
Thank you very much for your question. I promise to be accountable. We have something like 380 something; I cannot recall the number, of domain names registered .gov.eg. We have around 180-something of these websites up and running with reasonable efficiency, they’re not down that much. From our point of view at the Ministry of State for Administrative Development only 60 of them are good ones. How do we know these statistics? We have an annual award competition called Motamayezoun – distinguished. And it has three categories. One of them is the best service provided from a window. The second one is the best website, service provided from a website. And the third one is the manager of the year, or the distinguished manager. So every year we go and review these websites and rank them. So I totally agree with you that 1/3 of the government websites are good ones and we need to work on the culture of updating these. But still we have among these 60 some of them are really distinguished and international level. So that’s how we got our good overall ranking. There are two ways of doing things. Either we take over, which we don’t want to do as the Ministry of State for Administrative Development and go do their job. Or we’re doing a longer term one which is that we’re trying to help people do things because that’s going to be more sustainable than MSAD, or the Ministry of State for Administrative Development, goes and does the job on a regular basis. If I educate people and develop capacity building to make sure they are doing their websites I tend to think this is going to be more sustainable. As far as the budget, it’s already part of the Ministry of Finance website. We’re trying to simplify it for the public. Not sure if we’re doing a good job but at least for the past two years it’s been published on the Ministry of Finance website.

Question 2
I’m Sherif Kamel from the American University in Cairo. Again I’m going to address this as a researcher and professor before being a Minister. What you said when you go online and you go to academic journals there is some reporting of the cases of e-government services worldwide. We lack this in Egypt. I think it’s extremely important, given what you said, and given what’s happening that this is what’s reporting through research, through academic journals and so on. I’ve been asked in the past to do that with the Ministry and we’ve managed to do a couple of pieces but still I think there needs to be a mechanism or a vehicle that actually helps in documenting and reporting the experiences with its successes and failures to be distributed among the research community worldwide.

Dr. Darwish
Thank you, Sherif. Actually we started doing part of that. We have started to document two or three case studies. Magda is somewhere over here, I think so, yes here she is. We have some case studies, we need to document them in a scientific fashion. We started to document these. One of them is regarding our www.egypt.gov.eg. It’s an Egyptian gateway, has been created by an Egyptian company, it has been, Link. It’s an Egyptian design. We looked at other gateways but we have decided to design and create ours. So this is actually a success story that we are trying to export. We also documented another success story which is what is happening in our municipalities, and you might hear some good news by the end of the year regarding our case study on municipalities. But we welcome researchers to come and work with us. I already, the Ministry already sponsors several masters students and a couple PhD. students. We sponsor them to come and do research work, we give them the data, we sit with them, and I think this is going to open a good communication between us and academia because at the end of the day we are enveloped in the work but they are more set up to do such things. Send us your students.

Question 3
Thank you Dr. Darwish. I’m so happy that we now speak about e-government and maybe four, five years we didn’t speak about it and you have achieved a lot of things in this. But what stops me now, what you have mentioned that you are the Chairman of the Committee of Transparency. How do you see it? It is not just administrative or governmental decision but it is a culture, social, a lot of things in it, and history and all of that. How do you find yourself in it? How do you expect to reach what you want? It will be five years or fifty years or what?

Dr. Darwish
Thank you. In fact, since you asked the question, let me point out that we have some core services on the internet and the nice thing about it is that people like it because 30 percent, this is very high, 30 percent of the transactions with the Cairo High Court and Court of Concession in Egypt is being done over internet, so apparently lower offices like it. Another thing you might start using, it’s summer time, is we have train tickets on the web. You just go and reserve you train ticket and you just go onboard the train. You have your electronic ticket with you; you don’t have to go anywhere.

Back to your question regarding the Transparency and Integrity Committee…I have another side in my Ministry that I did not talk about at all which is the Organizational Developer. This is the classic Ministry of State for Administrative Development. We have an organizational or institutional developer that talks about organizational structures, it talks about skill gap analysis, it talks about human resources development, it talks about management styles and tools things like balance core cards and the like. Part of that of course is to make things more efficient and to enhance your ranking and to give good service to your citizen at the end of the day. This is what it’s about. You need to give good service because the government body is actually doing two things. They provide services to the citizen and the investor and they actually manage the country resources. They collect taxes and they actually sort of use this collected taxes on education, health, and infrastructure. So efficiency is a key word there. Part of that is in order to give good service and in order to efficiently manage your resources is to fight corruption. I’m a fan actually of the positive words rather than the negative words. So I decided to call it the Transparency and Integrity Committee rather than the Corruption Fighting Committee, something like that. For the first time in history, the cabinet met, we had a cabinet meeting on the topic of corruption and I gave a full presentation to the cabinet about the international industries where its does Egypt stand; what’s our position, what do we have to do? And the Cabinet came out with 10 recommendations. They are published on our website, by the way, and those 10 recommendations are very clear. Some of them, for example, are to issue certain laws – [such as] the Freedom of Information Act, the Right to Information Act, [and] the Civil Service law. Other things have to do with strategies, you know, the separation between the service receptionist and the service provider. When you do the services over the internet, the citizen does not get to meet the employee so there are no tips. It is not tips actually, it’s bribery. They like to call it tips but it’s not. Those 10 recommendations are on the web. Among them actually is the creation of a committee that puts strategy. The nice thing about this committee, actually, is it’s not a government committee. There are only three members on this committee that are government, the rest are non government. So for example on this committee we have Mr. Moneer Fakhry Abdel Nour. We have Mr. Labeeb El Sebai, who is from the media. We have Dr. Ahmed Zayed, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. We have Dr. Mohsen Youssef who has a long history with international organizations and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. And this collection of people it’s important because we are dealing with a very complicated problem.

For example, when we are working with the Faculty of Arts we have commissioned Cairo University the Faculty of Arts to do a study about values in the Egyptian society. How values in the Egyptian society has changed over the last 50 years. You know, as a doctor you can not actually give a prescription without doing lab analysis and X-raying and so on and that’s what we’re trying to do. What, why did values change in the Egyptian society. I totally agree that being poor pushes you to do things that might not be correct. I’m not going to dispute that. But my question is, are government employees today poorer then what they were in the 40’s and 50’s and the answer is definitely no, by all measures and indexes, in terms of the kinds of appliances and equipment they have at home, whether it’s a refrigerator or a color TV and a dish, and the education they are giving to their kids. All measures and indexes tell us that government employees are not poorer than government employees in the 40s and 50s. What has changed in the Egyptian society? How were Egyptians able to separate between their religious beliefs and their acts? How come a guy takes a bribe and then when the call for prayers is on he goes and prays? This is what we have to analyze. How and why Egyptian customers are so kind and they don’t fight for their rights. You go and you ask people, why didn’t you complain? And he says, I’m not going to change the world. I mean, they might actually pick on me and I’ll never get my work done. We made a survey and there is some sort of very, I’ll call it dangerous situation happening, is that 20 percent of the surveyed people who already paid bribes, we asked them, how about if we punish this guy or fire him? [And] 20 percent said, no, haram.

So the values in the Egyptian society are changing a little bit which is very important. There are a series of things this committee is working on. If you’d like to get invited to some of our meetings, we’re glad. You’re already on a much higher council, so I’m not sure if you want to attend with us. You’re probably watching us form the other side of the table. But this is a topic that should be our topic for the next few years. How many more minutes [do] I have Ahmed? Because this is very important...I’d like to give the awareness of the fact that there are so many types of corruption. There is money laundering; there is drug trafficking, and so many other things. But in Egypt when we say corruption the only type of corruption that comes to you mind is government corruption, am I right or wrong about that? Well, scientifically as Dr. Sharif Kamel was talking about, there are four types of government corruption. Are government decrees bias to a certain category in the society? And the answer in Egypt is no. I’m not saying no, but all the international organizations are saying no.

Number two is there transparency in announcement and for contracting and contracting in government? Is this our major problem? And the answer in Egypt is also no. Our ranking is also good in that – 40-something from 170, while our overall rank is 105. Because we, the law mandates us to actually have announcements in two newspapers and we usually take the cheapest price which is most of the companies are complaining about. It’s a different story that as a contractor to get your money you have to pay a bribe. That is not on their number two.

But number three, the fact that a government employee is making use of his position [by taking] bribes, whether to give you legal right or illegal right, it’s not a right, or your illegal request. Bribes [are] all over the world. You pay a bribe to get something that is not your right. In Egypt you pay a bribe to get your legal rights. So number three is our major problem and it’s getting all our agencies down. Number four, is actually sort of negligence in management. Despite the fact that you tend to think that negligence is not something that you do on purpose, but they tend to think that if you hire an incompetent for the job such that his negligence then this is administrative corruption. What Egypt suffers most from is number three, the irregular payments and this we have to work on, this we have to do awareness. The civil society plays an important role with us in that and this should be our fight for the next few years, to change the culture within government and within customers. I’d like the customers to come and complain, I’d like to customer or citizen to fight for his rights. Sorry for being very long on that one, but it’s very important.

Question 4
I’m Ahmed Saeed, Global Brands. I’m very impressed personally by the e-government project and I’m using it myself and I have to express I am with it. But I want to go back to the issue of illiteracy that you mentioned. You mentioned the figure of 29 percent illiteracy in Egypt.

Dr. Darwish
The official number is 29 [percent].

Ahmed Saeeid
Twenty-nine is the official number. As a matter of fact twelve years ago I was working with the cabinet on a national illiteracy project and the number was 48 percent, 80 percent of which were women. Now it came down to 29 percent. My question, now of course I believe your numbers because I know it is made on sound scientific basis, but what we read in the media is very strange actually. You have a lot of columnist, you have a lot of journalists who are talking about illiteracy rates of 48 percent, 50 percent, 52 percent, so is there any way to communicate with the media in Egypt to make sure that there is one number we’re talking about. Because I have read recently an article in The Economist. They are mentioning an illiteracy rate of about 40 plus, and they are actually referring to the columnists and the journalists they are reading in Egypt. So don’t you think we deserve to have one number?

Dr. Darwish
Thank you very much for brining a topic that is a favorite to me, but I’m not sure what we can do about it. There is this culture of throwing numbers in Egypt without actually giving the reference, giving the definition, telling the year, which is the most dangerous, or telling how you have collected this number. So a number to me without the definition, without a reference, without a date to me is nothing. Because I give you a very simple example. You ask me about the Egyptian population. I could give you a few numbers despite the question looking very simple. Are you asking me about Egyptians who are living in Egypt, or Egyptians who are living in this world, or those who live in Egypt. Those are three numbers. And if you don’t ask for the date, somebody will say, census is the point to start from, so he will give you the 2006 number. Some other person will say, but we increase by 1.3 million every year so I will take the 2006 number and add 2.6 million that looks like me the right number to use. So the same thing happens everywhere and this is something that I’m not sure it’s the role of the government because what we really need is we need the civil society with the media to educate columnist to educate TV anchors and so on that they cannot throw numbers without definitions. And we keep being accused that the government is issuing conflicting numbers. You talk about imports. You can get a number from customs, you can get a number from the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and you will get a third number from the Central Bank of Egypt. But they have three definitions. The Central Bank of Egypt cares about things that are imported and you have issued a letter of guarantee. The Minister of Trade thinks about things that are imported. The Customs thinks in a different way—even a small thing that a passenger is coming in is considered an import. So what you’re touching upon is very important. Yes we have governorates that have as high as 42 percent illiteracy rate. We are talking about overall average of the country. It’s true that women illiteracy is much higher than men illiteracy. Whatever the government says is always questioned. So a true trust will come from academia and those who understand things, they stand up and start educating the media.

Question 5
Shehab El Nawawy, Giza Systems. Thank you for the comprehensive session. I guess all of us are very impressed with all these services that are being offered through the Ministry. My question is perhaps a follow up to Dr. Nabil’s question. These developments and these improvement are all on the, as far as I can see from a citizens perspective, on the service delivery side. What about developments and improvements on the back office side and how to these developments impact and how could these impact and improve the issue of transparency. Is there something we can, whether as individuals as companies as vendors, do to improve in the back office side. That is back office, sorry my explanation is, what I mean by back office is what actually happens behind the scenes, not in the kiosks, not in the 500 kiosks that we talked about; but in the actual kitchen.

Dr. Darwish
Thank you Shehab. Your question has two sides to it – what happened, what is happening to work cycles. We are, whenever we go and do one of these services we enhance the work cycle. So for example, in the Commercial Registry Office we are changing the whole work cycle for commercial registration. For GAFI, the General Authority for Investment, I started that myself before coming a Minister. I went into GAFI and the measured number of days you needed to establish a company was 55 days. The average was 55 days. When I was appointed a Minister in 2004 I left GAFI where the average number of days needed to establish a company was 14 days. A colleague at the Ministry took over and the average number of days needed to establish a company now is 2-3 days. So we are working on work cycles, we are not actually automating the current work cycle because would be stupid enough but we are trying to see what are the irrelevant steps that you need to cut down. We have done a full study for the Ministry of Tourism we’re working with the Ministry of Transportation, we’re working with 21 Ministries on things like that. The other side of you question is what’s happening in our back office as government, in terms of accounting systems, general ledger, human resources and so on. And this we’re also working on and one of it is procurement which I talked about. We are changing that and these are kind of what we’re doing. For example, in our accounting units we have already finished around 205, maybe more. So this, what’s going on in the back office is probably even more important than what’s going on in the front office. I’ll give you one simple example. We are currently establishing the Government Certificate Authority, where it’s going issue digital certificates for e-signature. Should we actually automate all our payment systems in government and move into electronic payments that’s likely to save us a whole lot. Tell you why. The current average number of days to process a check in government is anywhere between 15-20 days. During these 15-20 days the money in Pounds circulating in government every years. Think of two weeks interest three hundred billion. So it’s likely that we’re going to save 600 million Egyptian pounds. That’s out of a single project we’re doing in e-government. The first digital certificate should be issued in a couple of months, and the Certificate Authority will be in full thrust by December of this year. We have already awarded the contract last September and it’s being implemented and the first pilots are out. I won’t promise we’re going to save 600 million the first year, but we’re going to save 600 million after three years because this is like getting the return on this investment something like 20 times. These are the kinds of things we’re doing on the back office. They have what you call an indirect impact on the citizens because if I save 600 million it means I can spend 600 million more on education. Thank you.

Well, again, the turn out of such a big audience shows our support as a community and an appreciation of what you do, Dr. Ahmed, and your staff. We wish you all success in all what you do. We wish to have more services on the net. Less corruption, more transparency, and we are all support. Than you again and please join me for a round of applause.

Dr. Darwish
Thank you very much.