A Conversation with Olga Tumuruc, Head of Moldova's eGovernance Agency

Thought Piece #19 Fresh off the back of winning the ITU's WSIS Service Design Prize, Tumuruc shares the secrets of building an award-winning digital agency...

When the UN’s International Telecommunications Union announced the shortlist for its annual Digital Service Design Prize earlier this year, it was a who’s who of digital government heavyweights. Fifty nominations had been whittled down to a list of just ten countries including digital government pioneers Singapore and India, and the advanced European economies of Germany and Portugal.

Given the strength of the competition, few expected that it would be Moldova’s e-Governance Agency that would scoop the prize. The award coincided with the culmination of a defining year for the tiny Eastern Europe nation, located between Romania and Ukraine. It is scarcely 18 months since Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu called on the international community’s support to help Moldova “stay on [its] feet” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the country managing more Ukrainian refugees per capita than any other in the world. However, just last month, Moldovan President Maia Sandu chaired a meeting of 50 European leaders at Mimi Castle in Eastern Moldova to discuss the future of Europe.

A similar coming of age has been reflected in Moldova’s digital government efforts over the past year. As Ukrainian refugees began to flood over the border in February 2022, Chisinau developed an online refugee assistance platform in just five days. A year on, it has supported more than 500,000 unique visitors with information about accommodation, food, healthcare and other government services available for refugees. I start my interview with Olga Tumuruc, the head of Moldova’s e-Governance Agency, by asking her how this portal was developed so quickly, when similar efforts elsewhere were hampered by data silos and overlapping efforts by multiple agencies.

The immediate answer is a simple one. “One night the situation changed drastically in Moldova”, Tumuruc reminds me, and “we simply had to respond”. But the nature of Moldova’s refugee assistance speaks also to a technical and organizational truth, namely the country’s strength in cross-governmental data coordination and reuse.

In addition to an information portal, Moldova’s refugee assistance platform also acts as a single source of truth for a refugee’s identity credentials. On crossing the border from Ukraine, each refugee is granted an identification number, which they must then present to the authorities to legitimise their stay. Given the turmoil involved in seeking asylum, a paper certificate or credential can be easily lost or damaged. To prevent this, the refugee assistance platform also provides a unique digital credential to each refugee, accessible by digital signature.

Such a service requires the coordination of border control and a range of departments involved in providing refugee services. With all the good will in the world, effective cross-governmental coordination cannot happen overnight.

“Gosh, it’s a lot of people”: Facilitating cross-government data exchange

In fact, the digital capabilities required to facilitate this type of cross-governmental collaboration are eight years in the making. Since 2015, Tumuruc’s team have been developing an interoperability platform focused on data exchange between different agencies and backed up by a legal framework requiring authorities to share datasets with each other if there is a substantiated legal reason to do so. Where once different agencies may have gathered their own data in silos, today each shares and draws upon consistent data, gathered only once.

It is a challenge for any data exchange platform to maintain and respect the data privacy rights of its users, let alone one which has the capacity for more than 600 data exchange scenarios and is being used by banks and insurance companies as well as government agencies. I ask Tumuruc how she can be sure that the platform is secure. She talks me through many of the security features that one might expect from such a product: it is a closed platform; employs cryptography; and uses public key certificates.

But when I press her on whether citizens give permission for their data to be exchanged in this way, she also tells me about Moldova’s digital cabinet. Everyone in Moldova is granted an online personal “filing cabinet”, accessible through a digital signature linked either to a passport, identity card or mobile phone number. There citizens are able to see all the data the government has collected on them, from information on their families, to their real estate and motor records. Tumuruc shows me her own cabinet, which includes a copy of her university diploma and even a screen showing any criminal record observations or penalty points on her driver’s licence (to be clear, she has neither).

Moldovans can view the data that the government has collected on them through MCabinet

What really sets the cabinet apart from similar services offered in other countries is the ability for citizens to see who has accessed their data, and why. On a separate part of the platform, citizens can see which government agencies and public services have accessed their data, under what legal precedent, and for what reason. “Gosh, it’s a lot of people”, Tumuruc chuckles as she shows me her own platform, perhaps a useful reminder that we should all be confronted with from time to time.

Politically, the cabinet is a bold move in favour of data transparency. Technically, in its ability to consolidate data transactions from across government (and even further afield), it stands testament to that same strength in inter-agency coordination exhibited in developing the refugee platform.

Building a prize-winning Digital Government service 

We return to the WSIS Digital Service Prize, given to the e-Governance Agency for its Front Office Digitization (FOD) platform. As so often with digital government services, the platform’s inspiration came in the pandemic, when interactions with the government became exponentially more difficult for citizens. The natural response was for Tumuruc’s team to dive straight into end-to-end digitalisation of as many critical government services as possible.

They soon found that this was easier said than done, confronted by the complexity of each department’s unique (and often highly entrenched) back-end systems. “If we went in there, we would never find our way out”, Tumuruc laughs.

Instead, the agency shifted its focus to the front-end transactions between citizen and government, developing a low-code framework for agencies to build services themselves. The philosophy behind this move depends on the idea of “building blocks” (see interweave’s interview with GovStack’s Yolanda Martinez). In recognising that there are a number of key interactions between citizen and government that can be repeated across services – applying for a document or making a payment for example – low-code solutions for each of these scenarios can then be deployed across government.

The Front Office Digitization platform does exactly that, containing a collection of visual components and integration libraries that allow departments to rapidly design and develop front-ends for their own services. Together with a series of reusable specifications that predated the platform, the idea is that FOD forms a key part of a digital government built from various interoperable components.

Moldova’s e-Governance Agency scooped 1st Prize for the UN ITU’s WSIS Special Design Prize

Take the example of a citizen applying for a birth certificate, one of the three primary use cases developed through the FOD thus far. A citizen logs onto a portal developed using the FOD. Through the interoperability platform, their personal details can be pre-filled from the state population register. They can pay for the service via the government’s payment “building block” (MPay) and then arrange digital delivery to their cabinet or paper delivery using MDelivery. All the while they are able to track their application through their cabinet and receive notifications from – you guessed it - MNotify. In the near future, the development of MPower will also allow for granting of Power of Attorney across the government’s entire digital suite, not just one service at a time.

As we turn to Tumuruc’s ambitions for the future, we come back to the idea of necessity. A “building block” approach to digital government is prudent but, as she reminds me in an echo of Andri Kristinsson’s Digital Iceland, Moldova lacks the human or financial resources to work any other way.

The next year will no doubt be another defining one for the country’s e-Governance Agency. Moldova’s Deputy Prime Minister has set a target to have 75% of the government’s 700 services digitalised by the end of 2024, Tumuruc tells me. That figure currently stands at just 200. Gaps in digital literacy between rich and poor, urban and rural, also persist.

And yet - just as demonstrated in the broader political contexts of the European political community - the WSIS Prize is proof that when it comes to digital government, Moldova is far from simply along for the ride.