P2P Learning Alliances on Public Services Delivery

           

P2P Learning Alliance of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan on public service delivery was launched by the ACSH in May 2016. This Alliance was the first ever implemented of the EIP Guide.

The aim of the Alliance is to promote a learning journey of peers during a series of P2P learning activities within the Hub’s capacity building interventions. The participants (peers) of three countries: Azerbaijan (ASAN Service), Georgia (Public Service Halls) and Kazakhstan (State corporation “Government for Citizens”) were practitioners involved with the public services delivery given their extensive experience in implementing “one-stop shop” principles.

The aim of the “one-stop shops” policy in these countries is to promote integrity and improve the quality of public services rendered through the Public Service Delivery Centres (the PSD centres), allowing citizens to receive all public services in one place.

Based on the EIP P2P Learning Guide the following actions are being taken:

I. Peer group foundational engagement workshop

The first P2P learning Alliance engagement workshop was held on 27 May 2016, where paerticipants exposed the country’s experiences and approaches to promoting public service delivery excellence. The aim was to gage the interest and understand the viability of a P2P Learning Alliance and, if determined as necessary and promising, to launch the Learning Alliance as a network of peers that would improve the implementation of “one-stop shop” reforms and strengthen the partnership among the participating countries.

In the course of the workshop, the peers presented their approaches to make the reform (modernization of public service delivery) happen as well as shared their knowledge about practicalities and challenges of the reform in their countries. Particularly, the peers shared their knowledge about various tools and methods to strengthen the prevention of corruption and to improve transparency and professionalism of staff in terms of ethical behaviour and integrity guidelines to achieve higher citizen satisfaction.

As a result of the event, the peers agreed on the following:

• To establish the P2P Learning Alliance on public service delivery;
• To share freely their country-level experiences and bring tangible learning results to be translated into improved practices at a country level;
• To jointly develop a handbook on regional good practices of public service delivery for the benefit of the wider region supported by knowledge products (case studies etc) that would inform learning activities.

The Hub’s role was said to be mediatory, i.e. assisting in producing learning tools and curating a series of virtual and face-to-face follow-up engagements.

II. Sustained engagement between the peers

The second stage of the Alliance was aimed at generating knowledge and building experience-sharing culture among the peers. The activities at this stage included:  

• development of case studies by the international consultants from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, that reflect the best practices in the field of public services delivery using one-stop-shop principle. As a result, three case studies were elaborated and issues ( the case of Azerbaijan, the case of Georgia, the case of Kazakhstan):

                               

• organization of the meeting of the international consultants with the Hub representatives to get the feedback on the knowledge products produced (case-studies);
• conduction of the workshops on public service delivery.

As of today, the ACSH held the following activities: 

• jointly with and UNDP Global Centre for Public Service Excellence (GCPSE) held a workshop on “Enhancing the Quality of the Public Service Delivery through One-Stop-Shop” in Singapore on 3-5 May 2017, with learning journey to OSS in Johor, Malaysia. Participated experts from 29 countries including peers. Result: a report on global trends was generated and issued, which summarizes the discussions and conclusions of the workshop. It serves as an advising handbook to improve the OSS. 

 

• with the NJSC “State Corporation “Government for Citizens” conducted a workshop on “Experience of Kazakhstan in the Public Services Development: Innovative Approaches, Challenges and Solutions” with field visit to the specialized Public Service Centers (PSC) in Nur-Sultan (Kazakhstan) on 19-20 October 2017. Participated 75 practitioners from 15 countries, where they discussed the PSD experiences and familiarized with results of the Alliance I.

III. Next stages

To comply with the objectives of the following stages (3 and 4) of the EIP Peer Learning Guide, the Hub plans to:

• elaborate an action plan for detailed and comprehensive study of the one-stop-shop practices in the countries of the Alliance, taking into account the interests of peers for future interactions;
• develop a handbook on reforming the public service delivery using one-stop shop principle;
• scale up these practices to the participating countries using appropriate formats of information dissemination (for example, official MoU signing to legitimize and authorize the lessons learned to be implemented in the countries to achieve impact at scale. Others might include peer training and documenting the progress made in each country).