OMSAR starts five-year
reform project of public sector

Plan includes hiring new staff, reskilling and layoffs

The Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR) has started the first phase, out of three phases, of its ‘Restructuring State Administrations and Institutions 2030' project or 'Reinventing Government 2030’ which aims to fully reform the public sector.

Over 70 percent of public service posts are currently vacant as the size of the State’s workforce is just around 8,000 employees. “This is an opportunity for reforming public administration,” said Fadi Makki, Minister of State for Administrative Reform.

“We will carry out a skill assessment of existing public sector employees. Next, we will determine who should be retained and who should be let go. This will be followed by three measures taken in relation to remaining employees: Reskilling, matching skills to new tasks after mapping new functions, and amending the salary scale,” he said. The vacancies will be filled by attracting new employees in proportion to the size of the State workforce that will be needed in the future and that will be determined later on.

As part of its reskilling project, OMSAR will introduce two initiatives in partnership with universities: a Digital Transformation Academy and an Innovation and Behavioral Science Lab. The academy aims to equip public administration with the right skill set particularly in the field of digital transformation. The lab will be used to reimagine and reengineer public services. OMSAR is also creating a platform that will operate like a market place between ministries and universities. The platform, which is being launched with assistance from the United Nations development Programme (UNDP) and other donors, will match the needs of ministries with skills available at universities.

OMSAR has so far looked at nearly 1,500 services in public administration and documented the process map of each of these services. The results were submitted to different ministries which identified 177 top priorities among these services. A further refinement of identifying key services was to ask the ministries to select from the top priority services those with the highest traffic, greatest impact, and that have more touchpoints with citizens.

The first phase, to be completed in early October, will involve listening to a broad spectrum of stakeholders in order to identify priorities. This will be done through surveys, workshops, roundtables, digital forums, town halls, and interviews. The stakeholders include top State officials, public employees, businesses, universities, municipalities, unions, and the media, in addition to the Diaspora, international partners, political parties, and religious leaders. “It is a bottom-up approach. OMSAR is currently in the stage of preparation of the plan. It lacks manpower and has to mobilize resources and this takes time,” Makki said.

The second phase, to be completed by the end of 2025, will involve developing the blueprint and transformation plan for restructuring the public sector. A steering committee will be created for this purpose. The third phase, which will be completed by 2030, will involve the full-scale implementation of the reform plan which will radically transform the public sector into a modern, digital, and agile administration with a highly skilled, innovative, and empowered workforce, Makki said.