The UAE government is tapping into entrepreneurial creativity to streamline government services and make queues a thing of the past, for a population which is one of the highest mobile application users in the world.
Dubai SME, the agency of the Department of Economic Development, has launched the SeedApp fund to support the vision of President Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to create a Mobile Government (m-government) within two years — providing information on everything from health services to emergency information through mobile apps.
Within 13 years, the number of Dubai’s e-Government services has grown from 14 to 2,000, meaning about 90 per cent of public sector services have come under its ambit — but the next step is m-Government.
Emiratis who come up with the best ideas for government services’ mobile applications will receive 60 per cent of the funding required, up to a cap of Dh100,000, to develop and test their idea, and create a company in the Dubai SME business incubator. Dubai SME chief executive officer Abdul Baset Al Janahi said there would be no limit to the number of applications selected, as long as they were creative, user-friendly and commercially-driven. “(We’re looking for) ideas that will help achieve president's vision of having a government that’s 24/7/365. — It’s as simple as that.”
Applications could cost as little as Dh4,000-5,000 to develop, depending on their complexity, he said. “The whole idea is to give the young people who have the ideas the opportunity to participate. If the government wants to provide these mobile services, it’s the clients themselves that will come up with these ideas.”
The UAE had one of the highest rates of mobile phone and Internet penetration in the world, he said. “The population is about four to five million, and we have about eight million...mobiles.” The government needed to direct its investment to application development, rather than, for example, building a new office or branch for services, given people no longer wanted to visit physical branches and wanted access anywhere, Al Janahi said.
“People today don’t have time, they’re busy in their jobs, or with their families, or stuck in traffic or at the hospital.
“One of the things that will be disappearing, like VHS, will be the queue systems...we should put them in a museum.”
Examples included being able to carry health records on a phone when moving from one hospital to another, being able to renew your visa by sending fingerprints over your phone, or public information in the case of an emergency.
When asked about the need for heightened data security and privacy measures, Al Janahi said people happily shared personal information through their social networks.
“Having said that, security will definitely need to be increased, and the government will look at that. When it comes to financial transactions security is a priority.”
The public would be able to vote online for the best ideas, with an internal panel making the final decision, he said.
Rishi Tayal, chief executive of InQuim, a technology provider for private and public organisations, said m-government was the way of the future.
UAE residents were one of the highest users of mobile applications in the world, outpacing countries such as the UK and the US, with high numbers of smartphones in the region — 90 per cent of phones in the country were smartphones.
The events of the Arab Spring, “largely an online revolution”, in the last three years had also initiated a kind of momentum in the use of tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype, which was now flowing through into other applications.
“Smartphones are not just a phone but a communication tool.”
Tayal said applications, installed only once, were a more secure way of handling communications than directly online, where the “threats grew stronger and stronger by the day”.
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