What we can learn from the women of e-Portugal

This article was published in Apolitical

It’s not a well-known fact, but Portugal is one of the digital frontrunners of our time.

When I first visited Portugal and its digital agency AMA in early 2018, I was most impressed by the unwavering focus in their digital strategy on improving people's lives, putting people's experience with bureaucracy at the core of their efforts to transform government.

People, not tech, were driving reforms. Since then, I have remained convinced that there is something special in Portugal’s approach that has made the digital transformation more empathetic. It is no surprise that the first of the four strategic objectives in the new strategy to modernise the state for the period 2020–2023 is about investing in people.

According to the United Nations e-government index, released in July 2020, Portugal continues to make progress in digital transformation and positions itself as a tech hub in Europe. In 2019, it joined the Digital 9, a group of the world’s leading digital governments.

What’s perhaps even less well-known is the interesting and novel approach Portugal has taken to achieve its digital prowess. Three key features stand out: they make it simple, set the tone from the top and put women in charge.

The front and centre role of women is a deliberate choice, not a coincidence. And it’s led to some impressive results. Below, I try to outline the most striking initiatives that we can all learn from.

A Simplex approach

In Portugal, the principal aim of reformers is to make government more agile and public services more seamless, cutting red-tape and reducing the regulatory burden. In other words, they strive to make government simpler. They are putting people at the centre and reorganising services around life events.

These efforts have included a single portal for digital services accompanied by an expansion of in-person service centres through the “citizen kiosks” or Loja de Cidadão in Portuguese.

Other emblematic measures include a new citizen card, the zero-licensing initiative — a process of simplifying administrative regulatory procedures related to economic activities — and on-the-spot company registration.

These efforts have required extraordinary levels of coordination between many public agencies and thus required a strong push from the centre of government. The citizen card, for example, involved 14 entities in 5 different ministries.

Simplification is at the heart of Portugal’s digital strategy, symbolised by its most successful flagship initiative, aptly named Simplex. Simplex is the main de-bureaucratisation initiative to digitalise and simplify public services through annual targets and projects selected in consultation with citizens and civil servants. The leaders in charge of digital transformation have persisted with this same approach to administrative streamlining, year after year, since its inception in 2006.

Over its 14 years of existence, 1500 measures to improve the design and delivery of digital services have been implemented via the Simplex approach.

At heart, it’s a participatory approach, involving citizens and civil servants who collaborate to identify inefficiencies, which has fostered greater collaboration amongst a whole range of public entities working towards a shared purpose.

For the people behind it, the process was as important as the product; it also had political benefits by building people's support to sustain the initiative over time. On 15 July 2020, prime minister António Costa launched the new round of the program for the next two years.

More importantly, Simplex has created a culture of innovation in the public sector, which contributes to increasing trust in government.

Digital women

A second key feature of the Portuguese reforms has been the strong political traction behind it that has been sustained over the past two decades. The digital agenda has been driven from the very centre of government, to push through critical and often controversial reforms across agencies that tend to be protective of their powers.

This top-down impetus has been complemented by a strong commitment to inter-agency coordination and stakeholder consultation — building support within and outside of government. It is also backed by the implementation capability of a technically competent autonomous agency created in 2007. This governance arrangement has provided remarkable continuity to the agenda.

But none of these achievements would have been possible without a third feature of the country’s digital agenda, and possibly its most fascinating one: the leading role women have played in shaping and driving it.

I believe this is one of the reasons for the empathy that is an integral part of Portugal’s people-centred digital philosophy, combining agenda-setting from the top with participatory approaches.

This also explains the progress the country has made in transforming its courts, as recognised by the OECD. In the current government, women occupy key positions in the governance of the digital agenda, notably Alexandra Leitão, the minister for state modernisation, her secretary of state, Fátima Fonseca, and the chairwoman of the digital agency, Sara Carrasqueiro.

The justice ministry is also led by women, where Francisca Van Dunem is minister of justice and Anabela Pedroso oversees judicial reform.

This is not a coincidence, but a trend. Women have been in charge at critical junctures of the country’s digital transformation. The digital agenda, for instance, was boosted by the “digital duo” driving administrative reforms between 2015 and 2018, with Maria Manuel Leitão Marques as minister of the presidency and administrative modernisation, and Graça Fonseca as her secretary of state, a position Leitão Marques had occupied between 2007 and 2011.

Leitão Marques was also responsible for the citizenship and gender equality agenda, embedding those priorities in the digital agenda. She understood that digital was a crucial tool to perform her task in a truly transformational way.

At the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) we had the pleasure of interviewing her for a review of Portugal's approach to digital (expected to be published in early 2021 in collaboration with AMA). She said: “From the very beginning, I saw that a mere digitalisation of public services was not enough. Sometimes it could even be worse. There was the risk of creating electronic bureaucracy".

"If we want closer, faster and public services, we need first to redesign them '…' Digital is not only code, computers or robotics. Digital is a tool to be used to improve the quality of life of everybody.”

A digital trajectory for our time

The trajectory of Anabela Pedroso is illustrative of the central and enduring role of women in the digital agenda.

She is credited with having brought the digital revolution to the justice sector when she took up the reins as secretary of state for justice in 2015. The main aim of the digital justice initiative Justiça+próxima, which she spearheaded, is to make the administration of justice simpler, smarter, and closer to the citizens.

She had previously been the first head of the newly-created digital agency and a driving force behind other flagship initiatives such as integrated services centres, the digital identity card, and the government interoperability platform — initiatives that have added to the legitimacy of the agenda.

The leading role of women in Portugal’s digital transformation has given continuity to the reforms’ underlying purpose and philosophy, avoiding radical swings in aims and approaches.

Now, as a member of the European parliament, Leitão Marques is working “to prevent gender bias in artificial intelligence, due to the under-representation of women in data sets and also on the promotion of the collection of gender-segregated data in order to better inform public policies, like the digital one,” she noted in the same interview.

Women have shaped and driven digital reform in Portugal. This is what makes it so unique. And, I believe, it is something we can all learn from.