One year into a two-tier local administration model, the mountainous northern province of Cao Bang has brought authorities closer to residents, improved service delivery and spurred socio-economic development in remote, disadvantaged and border areas.
Much of the population lives in highland and hard-to-reach areas where access to technology remains scarce. Public service officials have been helping locals boost their digital skills using straightforward, practical, and easy-to-understand methods.
Nong Van Thuy, an officer at Kim Dong commune’s Public Administration Service Centre, said he now handles professional duties while digitising documents, updating databases and coaching residents on using online public services. The workload has swelled considerably, but he keeps pushing to fulfil the role, calling the tasks essential to building a digital administration.
By late May, more than 65% of residents and businesses in Truong Ha commune were using online public services, according to Deputy Director of its Public Administration Service Centre, Nong Thi Xuan.
At a one-year review conference, Chairman of the provincial People’s Committee Le Hai Hoa said mobile-phone number verification remains incomplete across many highland communes, raising the question of how to teach residents in remote and ethnic minority areas to use public services.
To tackle that, he urged communes and wards to pivot sharply from “ensuring stable operation” to “improving governance quality”, building professional, modern grassroots administrations that run effectively and use public and business satisfaction as the benchmark for service quality.
That requires grassroots authorities to take ownership of tasks from the start, stop passing on responsibilities, upgrade the civil service workforce, accelerate digital transformation, and push administrative reform, he added./.
