ROME – Greek Minister of Digital Governance Kyriakos Pierrakakis participated at the forum ‘Verso Sud (Looking Southward): European strategy for a new geopolitical, economic and socio-cultural season in the Mediterranean’ held on Saturday in Sorrento, Italy.

This is organized by Minister for Southern Italy & Territorial Cohesion Mara Carfagna, and attended by Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Mario Draghi, among several others.

Reducing bureaucracy has always been the aim of Greece’s e-governance ministry and its unfolding digital transition policy, noted Pierrakakis, and he added that “the governments of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi share the same vision regarding digital policy.”

The Greek e-governance ministry, Pierrakakis told the forum, went ahead with two major reforms: “the first one was for all digital projects to be carried out exclusively by our ministry, and to manage those by a central budget account, which was significantly boosted with funds from the EU’s Recovery Fund.” The second reform was “the practical interoperability of all state services under one [digital] roof.”

More than 1,400 electronic services are now offered via the Greek government’s online public portal gov.gr, underlined the Greek minister. Some 567 million requests for digital services have been put through the system since 2009, he noted, compared to 9 mln requests registered in early 2019.

The role of the coronavirus pandemic in accelerating the implementation of Greece’s digital transition policy was very significant, he added, “as it brought the future forward.”

Greece and Italy have learned rather a lot from each other, he added, as Greece followed Italy’s approach concerning the microsatellites program, and Italy followed Greece’s approach from its ‘Smart Cities’ program.

(ANA-MPA/T. Andreadis-Syggelakis)