Ukraine is a highly urbanized country with 459 cities where about 70% of its total population lives. Citizens often need to get services from numerous state and municipal authorities. It has always been a challenge for 37 thousand citizens of Voznesensk municipality, quite typical for Ukraine, to understand the numerous legislative acts regulating the procedures, whom to address and the way to follow. What was done in Vonzesensk municipality to simplify the service delivery for citizens I described in the post below.
As the local self-government bodies are at the forefront of communication with the community, Yuriy Gerzhov, Voznesensk Mayor, and his team were not happy about citizens wandering from office to office of the municipality, and wasting their time to figure out what they should do to get the service. Geographical dispersion of administrative bodies and queues of visitors at each of them contributed greatly to dissatisfaction of citizens with the quality of service delivery, as shown by the opinion polls (54% of Ukrainians are fully or partially dissatisfied in 2011).
Then, in 2012 the United Nations Development Programme and the Swiss Cooperation Office within their joint project “Municipal Governance and Sustainable Development Programme” supported Voznesensk municipality for creating the Centre for Administrative Service Provision as the one-stop shop service model integrated in the municipality’s system to ensure that the administrative services are delivered in a more efficient and convenient way.
Over six months, the register of 91 administrative services was created; information cards for citizens reflecting the step-by-step procedures of service delivery were developed and displayed in the office along with the schedule of meetings with the other administrative bodies like State Automobile Inspection, Land Resource Service, Construction Office etc. Now citizens can download the information card for any service from the Centre’s official web-site, prepare the list of documents s/he needs to submit, and get the service within two visits only – first one to submit the documents to the Centre, and second to get the official response or certification.
“I addressed the Centre for being added to the waitlist for getting an apartment from municipality”, says Oleg Demchuk, operator of the local boiler house. “I am nicely surprised: now it is very convenient and fast. Feels like I am in Europe. Comparing with the process of documents’ submission to the city council 2-3 years ago, it’s like heaven and earth”.
According to the recent opinion polls, the level of people’s satisfaction with the services provided by Voznesensk municipality has improved from 3.0 (at a 5-grade scale) to 3.86. Among all, 61% of citizens have considered reduction of the period of time required for getting a service to be the most important outcome of the project; 22% have mentioned creation of comfortable environment for interaction with the officials, and 17% thought that the one-stop-shop model was important.
The citizen-centric thinking of the local decision-makers has become possible due to the 5-year history of strategic partnership between Voznesensk city council and UNDP within which the latter has widely supported the efforts of the municipality to internalize the community-based development approach.
This experience was promoted by the National Forum of Partner Municipalities consisting of 29 cities from 12 different regions of Ukraine. Two others – Novograd-Volynskiy and Dolyna – followed the example and created their Citizen Service Centres; several more are underway. In September 2012, the project of Voznesensk was presented during the Annual Meeting of the Ukrainian Association of Local and Rayon Councils widely representing all regions of the country as the successful approach to improve the quality of administrative service delivery by local governments.
Back in Voznesensk, the created Centre provided citizens with a tangible feeling that their voice is being heard by the local authorities. “Your opinion is important” is now written on the business cards of the municipal officials. Moreover, citizens were officially invited by the municipality to control the quality of the basic services’ provision (public transportation, health care, communal enterprises) and create the initiative groups of “secret clients” with the official reporting to the mayor. It’s the participation and good governance in practice.
Highlights
- The total cost of the above mentioned project is about 26.7 thousand USD, out of which only 47.4% was contributed by UNDP, and the rest was paid from the local budget.
- The idea of the Centre emerged from partnership with the local communities which resulted in the implementation of 25 joint projects aimed at solving development problems like renovation of the housing infrastructure, energy efficiency, establishment of the water supply and sewerage systems etc. These projects worth approximately 290’000 USD generated direct benefits for 17.8 thousand citizens and helped to build the trust between the communities and the local government.
- The empowered communities became more demanding towards the quality of its services. Therefore, the municipality was among the first Ukrainian 10 cities which introduced the quality management system for municipal services in accordance with ISO 9001:2008. Based on it, the processes and procedures of service provision were further improved by introducing the electronic documents flow in the municipality. It all created the solid ground for successful establishment of the Centre for Administrative Service Provision.
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