Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday proposed to establish a ‘South-South Network of Public Organisations’ to develop a broader understanding and exchange of public sector innovations among the global South, UNB reports. "It’ll also facilitate generating ideas, sharing experiences and learning from each other," she said.
The Prime Minister was delivering her statement at the South-South and Triangular Cooperation in scaling up innovation in public service delivery organised by Bangladesh and UN office for South-South cooperation at the Conference Room of UN Headquarters. Sheikh Hasina also urged her friends from the South to positively consider this proposal and friends from the North to support this initiative within the Agenda 2030 framework. "Attaining an equitable and sustainable development will remain a distant reality, if we fail to ensure governance and encourage innovation."
The Prime Minister said Bangladesh has already signed MoUs with the Maldives and Bhutan to collaborate on promoting and scaling up public service innovation.
Sheikh Hasina said the South-South and Triangular Cooperation has demonstrated their effectiveness to inspire international solidarity in achieving the MDGs.
"There remains a huge potential of this cooperation in realising SDGs as well. This, however, calls for sincere commitments, deeper engagements and action-oriented approaches among the parties involved," she added.
In Bangladesh, Hasina said, her government has brought transformative changes to the government, as it responds to rapidly growing expectations of the country's citizens. "We're committed to developing a citizen-centric and inclusive government. We’ve adopted a three-pronged approach in this regard."
To develop the innovation capacity of providers, more importantly government officials, she said, thousands of officials have undergone ‘empathy training’ to eliminate age-old complex processes from the system. “This has considerably reduced time, cost and frequency of visits – known as TCV – to improve services access by the common people,” she said.
She mentioned about extensive utilisation of ICTs for decentralising service delivery to graduate Bangladesh to a middle-income country by 2021. "We call this vision ‘Digital Bangladesh’. We've introduced thousands of one-stop service delivery outlets, known as ‘Digital Centres’, to bring both public and private services to the doorsteps of millions of people. We've created government information portals, virtually uniting 43,000 government offices."