Until 1994, the Brazilian state of Bahia delivered public services with little attention to efficiency or effectiveness. Citizens found it difficult to obtain basic documents like birth certificates, identification cards, and work permits, which were essential to earning a livelihood and participating in political life. Because issuing centers were mainly in urban areas with limited operating hours, citizens in interior areas were underserved, and applicants often had to wait in long lines and visit offices on different floors or shuttle between various buildings to fulfill all requirements. Poor management aggravated the problem. The state government usually placed its worst-performing employees in customer service positions. In 1995, Bahia’s newly elected governor, Paulo Souto, moved to improve service delivery by creating one-stop shops that would provide all kinds of documents under one roof in selected locations throughout the state. Souto’s reform team at the state Secretariat of Administration—the body responsible for public management—worked to enlist the cooperation not only of state agencies but also of national and municipal governments, all of which played roles in processing citizen documents. The state also hired new workers, streamlined procedures, expanded the number of locations, and deployed a fleet of mobile units to increase service access in remote areas. Regular customer-satisfaction surveys indicated the system was highly popular with the public. By 2003, when Souto won reelection, his reforms had not only simplified and accelerated document access but also demonstrated that government could be responsive and accountable to citizens.

 

 

 

In 2003, the new governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil, pledged to improve government efficiency and serve citizens better. Residents of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s fourth-largest state by area and second largest by population, had long bemoaned the difficulty of obtaining such vital documents as work permits, passports, and driver’s licenses, which are issued by a variety of federal, state, and local agencies. In 1996, the state government tried to solve the problem by experimenting with 26 one-stop shops that integrated related citizen services under a single roof, but the shops failed to reduce delay and confusion. From 2007 to 2010, the governor and his reform team restructured and expanded the one-stop shops. The reform team persuaded multiple levels of the government to cooperate more closely, revamped management practices, improved the physical appearance and organization of facilities, streamlined procedures, and installed an electronic monitoring system. Renamed integrated citizen assistance units (unidades de atendimento integrado), the new one-stop shops improved services, reduced delays, and sharply increased processing volume. In 2011, the team outsourced the management of six of the one-stop shops to a private company monitored by the state. The public-private experiment cut per-unit operating costs by 31%. By 2012, 30 one-stop shops were handling more than 6 million citizen transactions annually—more than seven times the annual volume in 2009. By bringing together diverse agencies from multiple levels of government, Minas Gerais was able to greatly improve the reach and efficiency of its citizen services.

 

 

Before 2003, the Central Bank of Egypt, called the CBE, had exerted little control over monetary and foreign exchange conditions. High levels of bad debt in the banking sector and erratic government policies had undermined economic growth. Without a credible and independent supervisory authority, Egypt’s economic woes deepened. In the early 2000s, political will for change grew within the ruling National Democratic Party. In June 2003, the Unified Banking Law, pushed through by the party’s economic committee, paved the way for revitalizing the central bank. To implement this law’s mandate and oversee sweeping banking sector reforms, President Hosni Mubarak appointed Farouk El Okdah in late 2003 as CBE governor. El Okdah realized that the central bank had to be overhauled before it could begin the job of cleaning up the banking sector. El Okdah and his team restructured the CBE, aggressively recruiting private sector talent by amending the Unified Banking Law to permit higher salaries, instituting performance-based promotion, expanding training programs and strengthening information-technology systems. By 2009, the results of this institution building were apparent. The CBE commanded authority in the Egyptian banking sector, engaged in independent open-market operations and issued credible monetary and foreign exchange policies. The bank’s structural changes enabled the successful management of a broader banking sector reform effort that helped lift Egypt out of a three-year recession.