Government Super App
to provide public services

Project will attract private sector investments

Kamal Shehadi, Minister for the Displaced and Minister of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence, said they are working on a government Super App which will be a unified application for all ministries.

During a conference organized by LeadersClub – by Lebanon Opportunities, Shehadi said that all ministries will use the app to provide their services. Each ministry will cooperate with the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR) in order to adapt its services to the Super App. Private sector entities could use the app at a later stage. Shehadi said: “All ministries will be able to use the Super App starting from the Ministry of Finance which has a plan to transition to the digital stamp. With the digital stamp, taxpayers will save time and won’t have to pay any surcharge to sellers of traditional stamps.”

This project also necessitates setting up a Data Pool that will handle sizeable data. “The Data Pool will require a lot of work and investment, most of which will come from the private sector,” Shehadi said. He said that the Super App has to be self-financing in order to ensure its continuity and sustainability.

Prerequisites for the Super App also include having a digital ID and a digital payment platform. According to Shehadi, it is possible to have a digital ID within one year. The digital ID will facilitate operating the app as it identifies each user benefiting from its services. “We will allow different kinds of digital payment transactions and I don’t have any reservation regarding account-to-account transfers which reduce the transaction cost for citizens,” the minister said. He said they are working to secure financing for these projects. “The public sector alone cannot finance the digital transformation venture. Therefore, we must resort to partnerships with the private sector. The biggest chunk of the digital transformation project will be implemented by the private sector,” Shehadi said.

He said that the Ministry of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence will morph into a full-fledged ministry with a mission within a few months and that the government supports this transformation.

Regarding the creation of a state-owned data center, Shehadi said that setting up a national data center would take around four years and that in the meantime the government can use data centers in the region and the access of the private sector to these centers must be facilitated as well. He said that this doesn’t expose the country to any significant risks and that private sector entities could create their own data centers as there is not any Lebanese law that prohibits them from doing so. There is already a data center owned by the private sector (Infostructure Kfour Data Center) and OGERO operates a data center as well. Shehadi said the Ministry of Telecommunications currently has the clear prerogatives to set up a data center but it is not the only public entity that is allowed do so.

As Minister of the Displaced, Shehadi said that they are digitizing all records at the ministry to ensure that the rights of the displaced to the funds allocated to them will not be lost and the government obligations towards them are fulfilled when the Ministry of the Displaced is terminated by a law approved by Parliament.