What We Can Learn from the Women of ePortugal

This article was originally 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 very impressed by the unwavering focus in its digital strategy on improving people’s lives, putting people’s experience with bureaucracy at the heart 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 modernize the state for the period 2020–2023 is about investing in people.

According to the United Nations’ e-government index—published in July 2020—Portugal continues to make progress in digital transformation, positioning itself as a tech hub in Europe. In 2019, the country joined 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 center 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 main objective of reformers is to make the government more agile and to make public services more fluid, reducing red tape and the regulatory burden. In other words, they strive to streamline government. They are putting people at the center and reorganizing services around daily life events.

These efforts include a unique digital services portal, supported by an expansion of face-to-face service centers in the shape of citizen kiosks or “Loja de Cidadão” in Portuguese.

Other flagship measures include a new citizen card, the zero licensing initiative, a process to streamline regulatory administrative procedures related to economic activities and business registration.

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

Simplification is at the heart of Portugal’s digital strategy, symbolized by its most successful flagship initiative, aptly named Simplex. Simplex is the main de-bureaucratization initiative to digitalize 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 July 15, 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 Portuguese reforms has been the strong political traction backing them, which has been maintained over the past two decades. The digital agenda has been pushed by the central government to foster critical, and often controversial reforms, in agencies that tend to be protective of their powers.

This top-down momentum has been complemented by a strong commitment to inter-agency coordination and stakeholder consultation, building support within and outside 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-centered digital philosophy, combining agenda-setting from the top with participatory approaches.

This also explains the nation’s progress in transforming its courts, as acknowledged by the OECD. In the current government, women hold key positions in the governance of the digital agenda. Such is the case of minister of state modernization Alexandra Leitão, as well as state secretary Fátima Fonseca, and Sara Carrasqueiro, the chairwoman of the digital agency,.

The ministry of Justice is also headed by women, with Francisca Van Dunem as minister of Justice and Anabela Pedroso overseeing 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 example, was driven by the “digital duo” that promoted administrative reforms between 2015 and 2018, with Maria Manuel Leitão Marques acting as minister of the presidency and administrative modernization, and Graça Fonseca as state secretary, a position held by Leitão Marques between 2007 and 2011.

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

CAF—development bank of Latin America—had the pleasure of interviewing her for a review of Portugal’s approach to digitalization (to be published in early 2021 in collaboration with AMA). In it, Leitão Marques said: “From the beginning, I saw that a mere digitalization of public services would not be enough,” she noted. “Sometimes it can make things even worse, as there was a risk of creating an electronic bureaucracy.”

A Digital Path for Our Time

Anabela Pedroso’s trajectory 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 Justiça+próxima initiative, which she spearheaded, is to make the administration of justice simpler, smarter, and closer to citizens.

She had previously acted as the first director of the newly created digital agency, becoming a driving force behind other flagship initiatives, such as integrated service centers, a digital identity card and a government interoperability platform, all of which have added to the agenda’s legitimacy.

The leadership role of women in Portugal’s digital transformation has given continuity to the underlying purpose and philosophy of reforms, avoiding radical swings in objectives 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, as well as also promoting the collection of gender segregated data in order to better inform public policies, including digital ones,” she also said.

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