Governments around the world are increasingly utilizing technology to improve service access and quality, use resources efficiently, and promote accountability. While some countries like India, South Korea, and Ukraine are known for their digital transformation efforts, Fiji, a small island state that’s home to just under a million people, is the most advanced in the Pacific region based on the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index (See figure 1).
Fiji has an enormous potential to use technology to better serve citizens and businesses across its archipelago, building on its existing mobile penetration over 100 percent and internet use at 88 percent of the population.As Fiji formulates a new National Digital Strategy, new survey evidence shows Fijians are ready for change and offers us insights on how to realize this potential.
While in Fiji, we saw long lines of pensioners and their caregivers outside banks to receive government benefit payments. We heard from focus group participants about the challenges they faced in accessing services, including taking time off work or making multiple calls to obtain necessary information. So, over the last six years, the government has sought to introduce e-services which has enabled Fiji’s citizens and businesses to do many transactions online such as birth registrations, business name registrations, utility payments, and pay their taxes. Adoption of complementary digital payment technologies is increasing, with commercial bank mobile and internet banking transactions quadrupling to 6.2 million a year between 2016 and 2022, and the number of mobile money transactions expanding 50-fold to 34 million a year.
New survey evidence collected by the World Bank through a High Frequency Phone Survey shows that Fijians are willing to adopt digital services – but a key barrier is their perceived availability. Over 40 percent of households surveyed needed one or more services in the month preceding the surveys. These were dominated – at nearly 60 percent – by utility-related services, births, deaths and marriages registration, government assistance for businesses and agriculture, and social assistance such as poverty benefits. Many of these services involve government-to-person (G2P) or person-to-government (P2G) payments. With just over half of respondents voicing a willingness to make payments through online government systems, we see expanding government digital payments as a quick win.
As an archipelago of over 330 islands, Fiji has service access challenges like those of Greece, Indonesia, and other island states. While the data was not stratified by island, it revealed important divides in readiness to adopt digital services by urban and rural households. There was typically about a 10-percentage point difference between their responses on receptivity to online information, services and payments. Level of education also appears to affect use, and a range of related readiness factors (See figures 2 and 3).
Expanding uptake can be achieved by leveraging demand for online information and government services. Twenty three percent of households already prefer to get information on government services online, rising to 31 percent for urban households (See figure 4). Nearly a third of households prefer to request services online than travel to government offices.
While there is interest in online services, the findings indicate limited availability. Only 17 percent of households needing a service in the preceding month sought it online, compared to 83 percent going in-person. The most common reason given was the service was not available online (46 percent) (See figure 5).
Less common reasons included in-person options being easier (20 percent) and not trusting online options (14 percent).
We see the results reflecting Fiji’s potential to better meet the needs of its citizens through expanding e-services. Resolution rates and satisfaction levels were higher for those obtaining services online than in-person (See figures 6 and 7).
Given positive overall perceptions of the government’s willingness to engage – with 67 percent saying the government is engaging in open dialogue with citizens and addressing their grievances – there also appears to be good potential to engage citizens to participate in service co-creation to ensure services meet the needs, wants, and capabilities of users. To further improve uptake, Fiji needs to conduct outreach to raise public awareness of online service availability, and bridge gaps in readiness to use digital services. Increasing connectivity in rural areas and expanding digital literacy at all ages will be critical to tackling urban-rural and education-based gaps. The recent launch of a program to build a national digital ID system to enable secure access to online services is also an important initiative.
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