Delivering digital government services: Lessons from service design work in Ghana and beyond

For most people, trust in government is shaped by everyday interactions. Can I renew a certificate without standing in a long queue? Can I find the right information without visiting multiple offices? Can I pay securely and receive confirmation? Can I complete a transaction without repeating the same information again and again? These everyday interactions shape how citizens and businesses engage with public institutions, and how governments deliver services efficiently and transparently. Yet in most countries, services are not organized around the structure of government — around ministries, departments, and agencies — rather than around the moments that matter in people's lives. A birth, a new job, or starting a business rarely fits neatly inside a single agency. The next generation of public services is defined by a simple shift: organizing delivery around people's lives, not the government structure. That shift is harder than it sounds. Redesign fails when governments change the interface but leave the rules and processes untouched. Weak services are rarely the result of a single broken website; they reflect the absence of a shared service-design methodology, a known reference architecture, and government ownership of the hard work of re-engineering how a service actually runs. The countries making progress design around a few durable principles — interoperable by design, build once and reuse everywhere, open by default with safeguards, and the user at the core — and start from the citizen's journey rather than the technology. Several countries offer a useful lens on what service design can reveal. For example, the United Kingdom designs digital services around people’s needs and uses common standards to ensure services are easy, accessible, and reliable. This human-centric approach surfaces problems and insights a technology-first lens would miss. For example, in Kenya, reviewing the birth-registration process revealed that although citizens can apply digitally, regulations still require the birth notification to be submitted in person at the civil registry. In Somalia, mapping the Grade 12 school certification process found that students visit the certification agency multiple times to receive a paper certificate with no legal digital equivalent. These gaps span legal, technical, and institutional dimensions at once, which is why they resist quick fixes. Ghana is at a pivotal phase in its digital government journey. Under the World Bank Group's Government of Ghana Digital Acceleration Project, the country has been exploring how a redesigned Ghana.gov can deliver greater value to users, culminating in a workshop earlier this year where teams mapped end-to-end service workflows across multiple government departments and agencies, prioritized service use cases to anchor the platform, and sharpened the vision of Ghana.gov as a one-stop shop for citizens and businesses interacting with government services digitally. This work builds on the World Bank Group's Service Design Labs, an initiative led by the Digital Public Infrastructure and Services team in the Digital and AI Vice Presidency, together with the Africa East and Africa West regional teams. The labs help governments redesign public services by working closely with the people who use them, testing practical improvements, and building the skills and systems needed to keep improving services over time. The Accra workshop also served as a live test of a new global service design toolkit, helping teams identify where a service-led approach fits best, run design sprints to test solutions quickly, and sustain momentum afterward. These country experiences demonstrate that the success of digital government services is not measured only by the number of services online but by whether people can complete their daily tasks with less effort, greater clarity, and more confidence.