The distance between the Palestinian Authority’s administrative base in Ramallah and the bright lights of Dubai is more than 2,000 kms.
For a group of Palestinian officials visiting Dubai this week on a fact-finding mission to try and learn from the e-government successes in the UAE, the yawning gap between the capabilities of the two nations can seem altogether greater.
As officials from Dubai’s customs, police, and other key departments yesterday shared the transformative effect that e-government innovations has made on their provision of public services, a Palestinian official attending the high-profile forum told 7DAYS that authorities back home still lack basic e-payment infrastructure.
On a day when Dubai institutions represented at the two-day Government Summit spoke of creating a “plug and play culture” and mused about providing citizens with a single username to access all government services online, Mohammed Tamimi of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior said their public servants sometimes went months without pay.
But despite their differing fortunes, Tamimi said he and other officials are keen to learn the lessons of “the Dubai Model” for their e-services in their own impoverished state.
“We have come here to learn from Dubai and the Emirates about what they did, because they are the leaders in services,” he said simply.
“How did Dubai do this? That’s what we want to learn from here,” he said.
Tamimi said the Palestinian Authority offered more than 130 government services online and had steadily worked to build its capacities in the sector over the last past years.
While officials continue to work on adding more e-services and drafting more efficient laws, he admitted obstacles remain great.
Where the UN last year found the UAE tops the Arab world in the provision of e-government services, a 2011 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) highlighted a “digital divide” in Palestine with almost half the population having no access to the internet.
The Palestinian Authority relies on the donations from the international community to pay the wages of civil servants, and there were protests in Ramallah in December after government workers went three months without pay.
“The economic situation - everybody knows that it’s not stable,” Tamimi said. “But we are working, we are trying our best to serve the citizens, that’s our goal. We hope we can do it.”
Visiting Palestinian officials are in talks about how Dubai’s innovations could be implemented in their homeland.
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Quelle/Source: 7DAYS in Dubai, 13.02.2013
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