1

AN ANALYSIS OF DEVELOPMENT OF
E-GOVERNMENT IN MACEDONIA AND CREATING A
MOBILE APPLICATION FOR THE SECRETARIAT FOR
EUROPEAN AFFAIRS
Burhan Rahmani, Florim Idrizi
Department of Informatics, State University of Tetova
e-mails: burhanrahmani90@gmail.com, florim.idrizi@unite.edu.mk
Macedonia
Abstract: At the moment, Macedonia is not in listed in the desired place
in the world ranking for e-government, regardless of the many efforts that
have been made to see an improvement in this field.This papers aim is to
conduct an analysis on the position of Macedonia for e-government in the
world rank list and illustrate one option by developing one mobile
application for Secretariat for European Affairs
Keywords: E-government, mobile application, world ranking for egovernment, Secretariat for European Affairs
I. INTRODUCTION
A successful implementation of e-government in the Republic of Macedonia
will certainly improve the services, which will help to strengthen our society.
Aiming towards transparent governance, engaging citizens and citizengovernment cooperation, the Macedonian government should have national
development strategies of governance.
Constantly both are initiatives of e-government to provide as many services
(service) by the people, and create a synergy potential between new technologies,
educated people and an enabling environment for achieving economies based
knowledge [1].
The goal of this paper it is to analyze the evolution of e-governance in
Macedonia between 2002 and 2014, and also to influence the evolution of one egovernment service through developing a mobile application.
We have compared progress of Macedonia in the area of e-government with
other neighbour countries in Balkan region.
We also have used Google form for questionnaire and the goal was to see if the
citizens in Republic of Macedonia are satisfied with e-government in Macedonia.

From the results of questionnaire which we can see in 4 th section of the paper
we saw that people are interested to have services for e-government in their mobile
phones and in 5th section we have presented one mobile application for one
government institution.
2. ANALYSIS
MACEDONIA

OF DEVELOPMENT OF E-GOVERNMENT IN

E-governance in the Republic of Macedonia started in year 2000, but the years
2001-2002 were the years that brought the fundaments of the e-government in
Republic of Macedonia.
Even that according to the new Laws of EU, it is requested from the countries
that their citizens to be served with e-governance, but in our country only in the
last couple of years some government institutions were activated to create
applications for e-governance but there were not enough development in this
segment.
This is seen in the world ranks for e governance that is made by UNITED
NATIONS.
This rank is in function since year 2001, Republic of Macedonia in comparison
with its neighbour countries and with the other European countries, is not still in
the desired position that we should be after these years.
United Nations evaluate is done by taking under account three indexes: the
index of online services, the index of infrastructure of telecommunication and the
index of human capital.
In the table that you can see below, we can see the ranking of our neighbour
countries and Macedonia in the ranking list of UN for e-governance in 2014.
Table 1. Ranking of Balkan countries in the UN list for e-governance-2014
Pos
34
41
45
47
69
84
96
97

Country

EGDI

GR
SI
ME
HR
SR
AL
MK
BA

0.7118
0.6505
0.6346
0.6282
0.5472
0.5046
0.4720
0.4707

Online
Service
Component
0.6063
0.4252
0.5276
0.4646
0.3937
0.4488
0.2441
0.2835

Telecomm.
Infrastructure
Component
0.654
0.619
0.548
0.627
0.468
0.354
0.452
0.399

Human
Capital
Component
0.874
0.907
0.827
0.792
0.779
0.710
0.719
0.728

In this table its illustrated that Republic of Macedonia is the second from the
end, and very far of their ambitions for further developing the e governance.
Furthermore from the table we can clearly see that Macedonians lowest index is
IOS (The Index of Online Services), what we shall also undertake to analyze.
Services or online service are one great weaknesses of the country of Republic of
Macedonia, which inevitably requires an improvement. [2]
Balkan country ranking in the UN list for e-governance
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3

0.71

0.65

0.63

0.63
0.55

0.5

0.47

0.47
EDGI

0.2
0.1
0

Figure 1. Balkan country raking in the UN list for e-governance - 2014

Even though we have had an initiative for developing the e-governance
services in Republic of Macedonia, but if we do a comparison from the year 2004
to 2014 the position of R.M in the ranking list for e-governance, we can state that
little improvements have been made throughout the years.
In 2004, R.M was ranked in the 97th place, two years later we have made a
leap of 28 places, in the year 2008 in 73 rdposition, almost the same as back in 2006.
In the year 2010 with some reforms there was a slight improvement in the field of
e-government and hence was ranked in the 52nd position.
Later on in the year 2012 and 2014 we had a big fall, Republic of Macednia
was ranked in the 96th position almost the same place as it was 10 years ago.

120
100
80
60
40

97

96
69

73

2006

2008

52

20
0

2004

70

2010

2012

2014

Figure 2. Ranking of Republic of Macedonia in the UN list for e-government from

2004 until 2014
The efforts that Macedonia has given in developing IT we can see it in the
statistics that are made from the Bureau of the country for Statistics.
According to these statistics from year 2011 to 2014,the usage of Computers
and Internet has drastically increased, which is demonstrated in the graphs below
where you can see clearly that in four years there is an increase of 10% in the usage
of Internet and technology equipment.
In the first graph the population of the Republic of Macedonia is presented
from age 15 to 74 years old; whereas, the second graph presents in percentages
houses which have access to the internet. We can indicate that the numbers are
approximately the same in both graphs.
100.00%

80.00%
60.00%
40.00%

68.10% 65.40%

20.00%

57.50% 56.70%

0.00%
2014

2013

2012

2011

Figure3. Usage of internet according to age (15-74) from year 2011 until year
2014 in R.M.

100.00%

80.00%
60.00%
40.00%
20.00%

68.30% 65.10%
58.30% 55.00%

0.00%
2014

2013

2012

2011

Figure 4. Houses with access to internet from year 2011 until year 2014 in R.M.
3. QUESTIONNAIRE
Even when we started to work for this paper we had some idea about the
position of e-government in Macedonia, as well as clear it was for us when we
analyzed the statistics of United Nations (UN) for e-government, our idea was to
realize questionnaire from where we will have our own datas and we will know
exactly what e-government services they want.
The online questionnaire is realized with the help of Google form, and for
period of 5 days we had 45 participants. Goal of questionnaire was to see if the
citizens in Republic of Macedonia are satisfied with e-government in Macedonia.
First question in the questionnaire was if they are satisfied with the egovernment services that are presented in Macedonia and the results show that 2%
satisfied, 27% not satisfied, and 71 % medium.

2%
27%

satisfied
not satisfied

71%

medium

Figure 4. Are you satisfied with e-government services that enables us Government
of Macedonia?

a)
b)
c)
d)

a)
b)

The second question was if they visit website of the Government and other
ministries, the results show that:
Never visit 7%
Rarely visit 46%
Medium visit 38%
Often visit 9%
From the result of second question we can note that people dont prefer to visit
the websites and they want something new.
Third question was if they are offered a mobile application, will they use more
often the mobile application rather than visiting the website, and the results show
that:
Yes 76%
No 24%
These results aimed us to create one mobile application for the Secretariat for
European Affairs.
4. CREATING A MOBILE APPLICATION FOR SEA
Mobile application of the Secretariat for European Affairs it is created on the
platform of Intel XDK, and programming languages that are used to create this
application are HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and RSS.
The application is created for three most commonly used mobile operating
systems for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
The application is created in the style of g-mail and YouTube applications with
navigate menu which can be closed and opened, while if the mobile devices have
bigger screens for example like tablets this menu is static.

Figure 5. Screenshot of the Mobile Application of SEA

What makes this application unique is that it is using an element of Web 2.0
technology called RSS, which we take through the RSS news of the Secretariat
from their website.
From the result of questionnaire we saw that peoples rarely visits websites of
government institutions and in the next question when we ask them if they will
have mobile application will they use more often the mobiles application and the
result it was 76 % yes.
By this application we think that we will help people to get connected with
SEA (Secretariat for European Affairs) by their mobiles. People do not have to
login for using this application, they just have to install and we dont save nothing
at our mobile phones, news and other informations are generated automatically
through RSS, so the application does not overload the memory of our smart
phones.
Also people who use this application can connect with the secretariat throw
this application with the social networks of the Secretariat.
For the moment application is in test period and is used by the administrators
of SEA and after getting the first feedback application will be in play store and iOS
store.
5. CONCLUSION
This paper tries to demonstrate an analysis for e-government in Macedonia
from where you can perceive that in 10 or 15 years, there has been made a lot of
work in order for further developing e-government, but Macedonia is still very far
back in comparison with its neighbour countries.
Also, working for this project and by the results that we got from the
questionnaire, we presented a solution for creating an application for mobile phone
that government institution will be able to use.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Ministry of Information Society and Administration (MIOA), Strategy for egovernment 2010-2012, January 2010 (in Macedonian)
[2] Burhan Rahmani, Florim Idrizi, An Analysis of Macedonia's Position in the
World Ranking in Years for E-government and the Development of an (Online)
Application for the Submission of Corruption, IJCST, Vol.6, Issue 2, pp.5861,2015
[3]State Statistical Office -www.stat.gov.mk
[4] UN E-Government Survey 2012,E-Government for the People, New York,
2012
[5] UN E-Government Survey 2010,Leveraging e-government at a time of
financial and economic crisis, New York, 2010

[6] UN E-Government Survey 2008, From E-Government to Connected

Governance, New York, 2008
[7] UN E-Government Survey 2005, From E-Government to E-Inclusion, New
York, 2005
[8] UN Global E-government readiness report 2004, Towards access for
opportunity, New York, 2004
[9] UN E-Government Survey 2014,E-government for the future we want, New
York, 2014
Information about the authors:
Burhan Rahmani - is from Macedonia, he is working as Assistant Professor at
State University of Tetova and Programmer at Secretariat for European Affairs, at
the moment he is student for Master Studies at State University of Tetova, and hes
areas of scientific research are e-business and e-government.
Florim Idrizi - is from Macedonia, he is working as Professor at State University
of Tetova and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, hes areas of scientific research
are cryptography and e-business.