It is well known, by now, that two pillars of any digital transformation venture in the public sector are electronic identification and interoperability. These can be implemented regardless of the level of digital maturity of a country’s government. But in practice, they serve no less as the starting point and prerequisites for any further advancement in this field.
El Salvador, in Central America, is a perfect example of that. The public administration of the country faces numerous challenges, from data collection to data quality and exchange. But a small team led by Eric Ramírez within the Secretariat of Innovation at the government of El Salvador has identified in X-Road a suitable tool to pilot secure data exchange over the Internet
Speaking to him, we found out how their platform Tenoli can help the state provide services more efficiently – with two practical examples in population management and ease of doing business.
Background and institutional framework
El Salvador’s first steps towards a more digital public sector started in 2016 when the government formed a dedicated unit – the Dirección de Gobierno Electrónico. In 2019, then, the new administration created an Innovation Secretariat which kept the existing e-government unit, and created additional teams to support the modernization of government.
Naturally, such a move indicated a clear intention to look into best practices worldwide and options to trigger digitalization in the country’s administration. “The timing was right as, between 2015 and 2016, the source code of X-Road had been published under MIT free software license. That was the chance to customize the technology and start implementing it in El Salvador – although, with NIIS not existing yet, this proved more complicated than it currently is today”, Ramírez says.
In the meantime, the national legal framework was adapting to facilitate the take-up of the technology. The Law on Administrative Procedures (2018) set out principles for a once-only approach to data collection. Then, the Electronic Signature Act (2016) formalized the validity and usage of electronic signatures in the country. More recently, relevant official regulation (2019) established requisites, rules, and proceedings in the matters of data exchange between government agencies.
Needs and challenges
From an institutional perspective, El Salvador has been gearing up for a push towards increased digitalization in the public sector. But the challenges to tackle have been, and still are, many. It is one of those cases where it is hard to pinpoint specific needs to address, because targets pertain to the modernization of public administration practices as a whole, cross-agency.
“First of all, human resources to drive such transformation are quite limited at the moment. Government agencies need to allocate resources to support modernization efforts. At the same time, the necessary cultural change to shift from using paper, or to replace costly point-to-point leased lines, also has to be widespread,” Ramírez warns. Many data exchanges between government information systems are currently happening over private leased channels. “But indeed, there are already more cost-effective solutions available,” he highlights.
Consequently, it becomes more complicated to turn a high-level vision on digitalization into practice. Not because this hasn’t been set out – El Salvador has an ambitious Digital Agenda, in compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. However, plans of digitalization also clash with other pressing needs such as building the necessary infrastructure to foster the general take-up of digital solutions.
The solution
To mark the first steps towards increased use of digital technologies in the public administration, El Salvador opted for putting in place a functioning data exchange layer. Using the free and open-source X-Road as a building block, the government of El Salvador has come to create Tenoli. Meaning ‘bridge’ in the local Nahuatl language, Tenoli is a platform – live since January 2017 – enabling public sector agencies to exchange information over the Internet.
Interest in the X-Road technology manifested basically as soon as the Dirección de Gobierno Electrónico was created. In 2017, one year later, data was already being exchanged through the layer between selected public agencies. “Beyond the possibility to adopt a more cost-effective solution, the business value we see lies in the way information exchange is standardized and secured. By now, we have managed to pilot and consistently run services in population management and business registration,” Ramírez explains.
So far, the most significant landmark has been indeed the birth registration service. This is particularly salient in a country where an average of 300 babies are born per day. Still, none of them institutionally exists until parents decide to carry out the paperwork for official registration at a municipal office. Or, much later in life, until a national ID card is given by the time these new-borns are old enough to vote.
“Connecting information systems between the Ministry of Health and the Population Registry was a no-brainer at that point. So, we searched for options that would allow us to do things as a private company would, while adopting a tech solution that would also be appropriately secured,” Ramírez says. Since 2017, when a baby is born, data from hospitals reaches the Population Registry digitally. Besides, the National Statistical Office makes use of this information too, for purposes of population census. In this way, such data gives public agencies the possibility to cross-check with municipalities information about newly recorded births.
Furthermore, data is also exchanged between the Ministry of Economics and a consortium of public partners to provide a tax ID to registered businesses-to-be. With that respect, the monthly average in the past year has been of 619 registrations. But at the moment, apart from the relevant portal MiEmpresa.gob.sv, no other services are being provided to citizens in the one-stop-shop fashion that the X-Road technology can favour. The room for improvement, though, with a widespread change of heart in institutional culture, can be massive.
“Some still use private leased lines to exchange data, but our work is also to make more and more public agencies understand that Tenoli is cheaper, secure, and most of all, scalable. However, to increase the outreach of the platform, a core value change is necessary. Because the solutions, tech-wise, are not complex or difficult to implement. What makes them work, also in our case, is cooperation, trust in institutions and the public administration. Where that fails, further advancements are just not possible,” Ramírez concludes.