LocationsA participatory service-design process carried out with staff from the Ministry of Community Development aims to place people at the center and unlock opportunities for innovation—integrating areas, streamlining workflows, and building more agile, simple, and effective services.
Comunidad Presente: A Public-Service effort that opens new opportunities for the people of Buenos Aires Province
December 16, 2025
Coordinating a pruning pick-up, checking vaccination hours, enrolling in school, signing up for a sports tournament… Throughout our lives, we interact with government service channels to resolve everyday needs. The ability to access these channels—and the experience we have while doing so—shapes how easily we can meet those needs.
For the government, citizen requests are also a key gateway for reaching the populations each programme or policy intends to serve. They enable institutions to achieve their goals and use public resources effectively. This is why understanding and improving how these requests are received and processed is so critical. As the supply of services grows—and as a district’s population and geography expand—the challenge intensifies. Now imagine what this looks like for the Ministry of Community Development of the Province of Buenos Aires (MDC): the largest district in the country and one with persistently high levels of inequality.
Against this backdrop, the MDC set out to understand in depth how requests for social assistance are currently received and processed, to improve them and eventually create a one-stop shop. To support this effort, the Ministry invited UNDP Argentina to partner on an assessment process starting in August 2024. The findings offer valuable insights into the crucial role played by the staff who are the Ministry’s public face, as well as the daily challenges they face. Like mapping traffic flow, visualizing the path of a service request reveals bottlenecks and detours—precisely the points where opportunities for innovation emerge. Before describing our process, we share some of the ideas that inspired our thinking about these opportunities and the new paradigms that place people at the center.
Improving Public Services and Opening Space for Innovation
PNUD en Argentina
Public-sector innovation is always challenging because bureaucratic systems tend to evolve incrementally—adjusting at the margins, building on what already exists. As often happens, new practices coexist with old ones; some areas innovate more than others; and legacy systems frequently overlap without fully interacting, creating operational friction.
Occasionally, crises or unexpected events become the catalyst for advancing service reform. For example, the digitization of public administration—which began in the 1990s with paper reduction and the introduction of digital services—was a major leap forward. In Argentina, the 2001 crisis, the requirement to open salary-payment accounts, and financial restrictions that reduced the circulation of cash all accelerated the adoption of online banking. This shift built trust and opened the door for people to engage confidently with other digital services. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered another wave of adoption, embedding online interactions more deeply into people’s routines and organizational processes. Today, as the race to adopt AI accelerates, many districts face heterogeneous digital infrastructures and outdated systems that lack interoperability.
Even with nonlinear pathways, many districts have implemented technology-driven innovations to improve citizen services. Across Argentina, there are numerous experiences aimed at improving service delivery and government–citizen interaction at municipal and provincial levels. Some local governments—such as San Fernando, Tigre, and Rosario—have implemented one-stop shops to address fragmentation, reduce the proliferation of phone lines, and provide updated information. Others have gone further: the Province of Córdoba and the municipalities of General Pueyrredón and Luján de Cuyo have developed digital platforms that let residents handle their own service requests, offering clearer tracking and cutting down on administrative steps. This is crucial not only because digital tools push the state to modernize, but because people increasingly expect to resolve their needs simply and efficiently.
A Service-Design Approach
Beyond the momentum of digitalization, a broader shift in service paradigms is underway—one that focuses on users. Public services are no exception. Service design provides a comprehensive lens to answer key questions by placing users at the heart of the process. It is co-creative (engaging all relevant actors), sequential (breaking complex services into stages and user journeys), evidence-based (informed by qualitative and quantitative data, prototyping, and testing), and holistic (addressing every touchpoint and interaction network).
Success in service design is reflected in simplified interactions, reduced effort for users, and more effective inter-institutional coordination. While modernization is always a goal, challenges arise when technology becomes a barrier—whether due to lack of support for users or when automated systems inadvertently deepen inequalities.
This is why service reform and innovation require an integrated approach that looks closely at how a service actually works. That means understanding how digital and in-person channels coexist; how long people wait; whether schedules and staffing are adequate; the quality of interpersonal communication; and, crucially, the working conditions of frontline staff. A thorough assessment of these elements helps reveal opportunities to improve efficiency—streamlining processes, reducing costs, and enhancing the experience of both the people who use services and the staff who deliver them.
The assessment
These were the contours of the challenge facing the MDC: understanding the current state of its service channels to improve them—and doing so through a joint assessment process with UNDP.
The work began with a review of national and international experiences related to creating or reforming request-management systems. We also interviewed experts who have led complex reform processes, often linked to digital-service transformation. These insights informed the feasibility and design of the Ministry’s potential new one-stop shop.
Using a service-design lens, we also incorporated the voices of frontline staff responsible for citizen attention. Through their accounts of day-to-day work, we identified common patterns, divergences, constraints, overlaps, existing resources, and opportunities emerging from their lived experience.
We learned that request-reception tasks are distributed across multiple areas that emerged in response to different needs and moments. Physical attention—both at MDC offices and through territorial operations—coexists with virtual and telephone channels that have evolved unevenly. For instance, the area created during the mandatory COVID-19 lockdown continued providing citizen-attention services well into the post-pandemic period.
Each area records and forwards requests using different instruments and logics. This presents a clear opportunity to introduce new management tools, as current systems were designed for other purposes.
We also reconstructed the internal workflow of requests. These findings were validated in a workshop where additional team members—who had not been interviewed—reacted to our interpretations and contributed valuable information.
We build the way by moving forward
Organizations have lives of their own. The very act of understanding a process or institutional area can generate unexpected effects. During the validation workshop, for example, teams developed greater empathy. Several participants met in person for the first time; others had never discussed their work in such depth.
Participants identified several shared challenges across request-reception areas. One of the main bottlenecks is demand that exceeds capacity; another is defining the boundaries of their responsibilities.
This has two dimensions. First, people often request services that fall outside the Ministry’s mandate—or even belong to another level of government. Yet staff consistently reported that they respond to all requests, even those that should be handled by national agencies or other provincial ministries, ensuring that people receive the information they need regardless of jurisdiction.
Second, establishing clear limits around “how far our work should go” is difficult. When a request is forwarded and the responsible area handles it promptly, the situation resolves. But when it is not resolved and people continue seeking answers, experienced staff frequently go beyond their formal role to help facilitate next steps or contacts.
These insights highlight the potential value of integrating areas to coordinate more effectively, learn from one another, and quickly detect duplicate or conflicting requests. The diagnostic process itself also strengthened the team’s engagement with other provincial areas, as well as their interest in learning from other jurisdictions and experts.
Together, UNDP and the MDC set out to approach this process in an innovative way—sensitive to institutional culture while attentive to the multiple factors shaping management and decision-making in the public sector.
Throughout the work—led by the Accelerator Lab and the Inclusive Development Cluster—we adopted a systemic lens to understand the Ministry’s internal processes, identify key bottlenecks, ask the right questions, and support the development of the assessment, the review of prior experiences, and the formulation of proposals for institutional improvement.
Ultimately, redesigning services by incorporating the voices of both citizens and staff not only aligns tools with real needs, but also legitimizes reforms and increases their chances of success. Exploring how to redesign services is far more than a technical exercise—it is a commitment to building a more innovative Ministry, one better equipped to respond to the people it serves.
