Azerbaijan’s journey towards proactive e-services

By Luke Cavanaugh

Azerbaijan’s DOST Digital Innovations Centre’s Deputy Director shares with GovInsider how the country delivers proactive services to citizens.

Since 2022, the DOST Digital Innovations Centre has served more than 9.2 million people (in a country of 10.2 million) through services such as digital distribution of birth and disability benefits. Image: dost.gov.az

From the beginning of our conversation the Deputy Director of Azerbaijan’s DOST Digital Innovations Centre, Orkhan Salahov, is keen to stress two things.

 

 First, he wants to present the human face of his centre’s digital offerings.

 

“DOST means ‘friend’ in Azerbaijani”, he tells me, and his centre since 2022 has been serving as a focal point of the digital modernisation of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of Population.

 
Deputy Director of Azerbaijan’s DOST Digital Innovations Centre, Orkhan Salahov. Image: Salahov's LinkedIn 

In this short period of time, the Innovations Centre has served more than 9.2 million people (in a country of 10.2 million) through services such as digital distribution of birth and disability benefits.

 

Out of the Ministry’s 160 services, 91.5 per cent have been digitised to date, with 56 using a proactive mechanism that requires no citizen input at all.

 

The second thing Salahov stresses is that this success has been a long time in the making. In a recent interview with David Eaves, the creator of the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Map, we talked about the fact that while DPI seems to have exploded over the past year, in fact it has been something of a 20-year overnight success.

 

Similarly, Salahov outlines four periods of Azerbaijani state social sector digitalisation, reaching right back to “computerisation and digital infrastructure” back in 2003.

 

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Creating a “one stop shop” digital centre

 

While e-government efforts are nothing new in Azerbaijan, a Presidential Decree expanded the utilisation of e-services for labour, employment, social protection and social security back in 2018.

 

It was on the back of this decree that the DOST Innovations Centre was established in 2022, the unification of all IT departments and processes from the Ministry into a single institution.

 

Prior to this, the Ministry and its subordinate bodies each had separate IT departments, mostly functioning as IT “help desks” rather than actively providing services themselves.

 
The creation of DOST Innovations Centre is just one part of a larger digital social journey in Azerbaijan. Source: DOST Azerbaijan

DOST Centres today operate as “one-stop-shops”, serving as front offices that provide citizens with social services across employment, labour, disability services and social protections. Through a platform designed to automate the creation, storage and retrieval of information (CEIS), the DOST Centres can draw on 17 comprehensive social registries.

 

To ensure seamless information flow and the efficient delivery of electronic services in the social sector, the Ministry’s information integrates data from over 80 state and private institutions, facilitated by a “digital bridge” providing a centralised system for nationwide information exchange.

Proactive services the Azerbaijani way

 

One of the four formal missions of the DOST Innovations Centre – perhaps the most innovative - is to “increase the number of services operating with a proactive service mechanism”.

 

Salahov tells me, “we do not wait for the citizens to declare any kind of services, rather the system creates and collects information about citizens and establishes their rights”.

 

He gives the example of disability payments.

 

“The process begins with identification, where the mechanism identifies individuals who have been granted disability status through a data subsystem, from which relevant data is retrieved,” he shares.

 

By coordinating with databases from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice, and State Tax Service, the process gathers and validates an individual’s ID details, including confirming they are alive and have sufficient pension capital.

 

Once these verifications are complete, a disability benefit is automatically assigned to an individual.

“The system notifies the partnering bank about the need to open an account, and the bank issues a card to them. A text message is subsequently sent to the citizen, which informs them about the payment and how to access it.’

 

We have encountered the concept of proactive services in interviews before, for example in speaking to Kazakhstan’s Askar Zhambakin.

 

But what makes Azerbaijan’s approach unique, as Salahov says, is that while  “Kazakhstan informs citizens of their right to access a payment via SMS and asks if they would like to receive it, in Azerbaijan the government automatically provides services as rights are established.”

 

This approach raises interesting questions about the limits and potential of proactive services.


For a citizen, Baku’s approach is of the utmost convenience, removing any risk of them not seeing a notification or not being sure how to authorise a payment.

 

However, it also raises questions about efficacy of services – deciding for an individual about whether the service is best for them. As each government approaches citizen services proactively, it will be up to them to determine to how far they go in their quest to remove any onus from the citizen.

Looking ahead to 2025

 

Clearly, this model of proactivity is working for Azerbaijan, and this means that DOST Innovations Centre is able to execute as many as 25,000 assignments in one day. In 2024 alone, over 250,889 individuals received a proactive social payment, the most commonly assigned being the lump sum birth benefit.

 

Looking ahead to 2025, the Centre’s ambition remains undimmed.

 

It plans to implement a data-driven proactive approach, where proactive notifications and services form the foundation for all other processes. So too, in a nod to one of the other pre-eminent trends of digital government today, does Salahov expect AI to play an increasingly significant role for the centre.

 

“We believe that chatbot interactions and call centre activities are key areas where AI can provide significant benefits”, he says.

 

 “At the Innovations Centre, we have already established an AI division, which has begun researching trends and conducting initial assessments to identify areas that can be transformed to AI-driven mechanisms”.

 

With DOST Digital Innovations Centre’s impressive pre-existing commitment to end-to-end proactive services, these AI mechanisms stand to serve Azerbaijan more than most.