Digital self-service for life cycle and targeted social protection in Cook Islands

Background: The Government of Cook Islands has established numerous social protection programmes to improve welfare, reduce inequity and economic hardship. However, the manual application processes were cumbersome, and error-prone for service providers. The lack of a digital register to maintain a database of social protection beneficiaries had been a bottleneck to digitalising the operations of service providers.

Solution: With funding from the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), Bewsys designed and developed a social welfare management information system to enable staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to effectively manage applications for social protection programmes. This user-friendly system was designed to ease the process of registration, verification and enrollment and exit of beneficiaries. It was also designed to enable the ministry to receive and process beneficiary complaints and feedback, monitor and report performance while strengthening effective stakeholder collaboration to improve social protection responsiveness and coverage.  

Impact: The outcome of this comprehensive management information system was a positive one as the system has made staff effective and expedited the application and payment processes for beneficiaries of social protection programmes. It has provided better administration and service delivery of social protection programs, schemes and mechanisms. Ultimately, this system has helped support evidence-driven planning for the Government of Cook Islands in strengthening its formal social protection system.