The objective of this research and the Digital Gap Assessment is to identify the main challenges of accessibility of IT tools and digital literacy among citizens. Moreover, the aim is to use the report in order to plan and propose new digital tools that go hand in hand with the adequate information and sensibilization of the citizens for its use.

In North Macedonia, the political priorities for digitalization of the last years have led to creation of various programs and national tool for digital public services. However, digitization processes at the local level are lagging behind, resulting in a very limited number of electronic services available to citizens. To modernize the municipalities and their public services, it is necessary to build the IT knowledge and skills as well as to adapt the internal work processes. Additionally, to address the multi-dimensional challenge of digitalization, various aspects should be taken into account such as: transparency and sharing of public data, developing e-skills among the citizens and digital gap, cyber security and digital identity. The technical and financial capacities of municipalities to implement digital transformation processes are very weak. The number of municipalities that have IT potential in terms of equipment and human resources is limited. Most of the municipalities struggle to ensure basic IT services both internally and towards their citizens. Due to the serious differences in the digital readiness of the municipalities, they are not able to provide some functional and safe digital solutions.

In order to respond to the above challenges, the project "Macedonian model of e-Municipality", financed by the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic (MFSR), deals with inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) as one of the options for ensuring balanced digital development of municipalities.