Prime Minister Edi Rama today attended the World Government Summit in Dubai that brought together heads of state and government and leaders from all over the world, high representatives of international and regional organisations and global institutions, under the theme of ‘Shaping Future Governments’.
Prime Minister Rama was invited to the panel “Transforming Nations: Is Tech our Solution” in a conversation with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss role of technology in addressing government challenges at a time when Albania ranks among countries with distinguished results in digital governance.
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Tony Blair: High everyone! I am very glad to be here at this World Government Summit. Actually today is somehow unusual for me as I will be an interviewer. I will ask questions rather than answering them, but the context is very simple. We are living through this extraordinary technology revolution and in my judgment and also in judgment of my organization, which works in many countries throughout the world, this technology revolution gives us to do something that has not been conceived of many, many years, and that is to re-imagine the state itself, because a 19th century state was a minimalist state that didn’t do enough for the people, didn’t raise a lot of money, didn’t spend a lot of money and didn’t do a lot for the people. The 20th century state grew into a huge apparatus, especially in the developed nations with large amounts of money spent, a large amount of provision from the government, but today is not operating in a very effective way.
The question through this century is: “Can you re-imagine the state through the technology revolution?” to create a 21st century state that delivers high-quality services at much lower cost to their citizens. That’s the challenge and there is nobody else better to discuss it with my friend Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama. Actually I would like start, Edi, with an overall sort of macro question. The title of our session is “Is Tech the Solution”? I would say, but tell me whether you agree or not, technology is certainly a major part of it. How big is this technology revolution and how hard is it for the political leaders to keep up with it?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: First of all, I would like to correct the presenter, because I was presented as a Prime Minister and Tony was presented as the 51st Prime Minister of Great Britain, but I would like the audience to know that I would be neither a prime minister nor a man involved in politics without him and before knowing him. He was my role model and he was the inspiration for me to join the politics, to reform the Socialist Party and to believe that not only politics can be a force for good, but it can also be a third way for the left. I wanted this to be clear, because that’s how you would understand that I can’t be more privileged than finding myself being interviewed by someone who now is a friend of mine, and this is an honor, but he is the main reason why I became a prime minister.
I would say that we came out of a long-time darkness. We were the North Korea of Europe; we were completely cut off the rest of the world. We were told to be the only true communist country and for us all of those who pretended to be communists were indeed just traitors. So, we were completely on our own, in a poverty rate that is impossible to process today and isolation like nowhere else.
Of course we entered the new era of change, the era of building a democratic state, the era of building the institutions, but what we learned in the hard way is that you can change a system some day, but you can’t build the institutions in many years. So, the institution building process in the traditional way would have taken, I don’t know how many decades, if not centuries.
Whereas with technology you can make a huge leap forward to the future and this is something really unimaginable until the current state of innovation.
Tony Blair: Definitely the artificial intelligence is a revolution itself and you are trying now in Albania to take advantage of that. What are you doing is that you are building a digital infrastructure, you have got plans for digital identity. Tell us about the different elements of how you are bringing about this digital revolution in the country?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: I don’t know how many people from the audience are familiar with, but I am sure that everyone has learned something about Albania in the last 30 years. They might have heard that Albania is a country that suffers from corruption, a country that suffers from crime and a country that suffers from all the bad things.
A big part of it has been true, a part of it has been a kind of augmented by the international media, but when you have to build a modern state, when you have to build functioning institutions, you have to count on people. So, in every process you have to count on people, but counting on people is not enough, because as the saying goes “it is not the people that corrupt the system, but it is the system that corrupts people.” So you need to build systems that are capable of keeping the people on leash in terms of respecting the procedures, respecting the rights of everyone. And what technology does is that it takes the “middleman” out of the picture and ensures that the public service delivery system is directly related to the people. Let me give you an example. We have completely changed the way we deliver our public services without paperwork involved. It was not many years ago, when people had to wait on long queues to obtain any paper, certificate, license or any type of document criminal records checks or to show that your driving license has never been suspended. And therefore a lot of bad things used to happen and one even had sometimes to cross the line in order to obtain the required document.
Tony Blair: And all of that is digitized now?
PM Edi Rama: All is digitized now, and the service windows are no longer existent. Everything is now a direct interaction between the people asking for a public service and his smart phone or his computer. When we embarked on this, certain individuals claimed that technology would deny old people and farmers from obtaining public services this way, since they had no access to technology. On the contrary, this provided access to all of those who didn’t stand a chance to obtain such services in person, because they would have to travel from the villages to the towns, to stay on long queues and so on and so forth.
Tony Blair: I think the thing that is interesting to literally go through every aspect of the government and see how changes come about. You can do it in health care, you could do it in education, you could do it in the payments you make to people, but you have also done it in terms of your move towards the European Union and how you changed the regulations in order to make Albania a good partner for that European path.
PM Edi Rama: This is another example showing how technology can be a blessing for the underdeveloped countries and how technology can make these countries deliver on things that would be totally impossible if it was not for the technology, and even overcoming developed countries that are far ahead of them.
For us to join the European Union technically we need to transpose all the so-called the body of law of the European Union. To give an idea to the audience, this is about more than 4 000 laws and bylaws that need to be transposed. Traditionally, for countries that have joined the EU before us, this has implied an army of translators, an army of drafters, an army of certifiers and, minimally in the case of Croatia that has been very successful, this process took seven years.
Tony Blair: So it took seven years to Croatia?
PM Rama: Seven years just to complete this law transposition process, which includes mountains of paperwork.
Luckily enough, one of the most prominent figures of the OpenAI and ChatGPT is an Albanian lady. I called her as soon as the ChatGPT was introduced and I asked her: “Can you help Albania join the European Union faster?” She thought I was kidding. I said: “No listen! Can we make use this technology to deliver on this transfer?” She said: “Well, this is interesting. Let’s give a try.” And tests are telling us that we can do it via the existing technology that has advanced in the last two years. Bu taking notice of how technology is improving each month, I am sure this time will shorten. So it is about a change that was unimaginable as to where it can take us in terms of arriving faster in stages that would otherwise take many generations to arrive.