For many Albanians, dealing with the state increasingly means dealing with a screen. Certificates, tax information, business services, applications, and employment opportunities that once required a visit to an office are now accessed through digital platforms.
This has obvious advantages. An online service can save a journey, a queue, and hours of somebody’s day. But digitalization also changes where barriers occur.
A staircase at the entrance to a public building is a clear barrier. A confusing menu, an identification code that never arrives, a button that does not work on a phone, or instructions the user cannot understand are much less obvious.
The service is online; but the citizen may still be unable to reach it.
What happens then? Do people try again, ask a family member, go to a stationery shop, or simply give up?
These questions were the starting point for “Can We Reach the State?”, a citizen-testing initiative looking at Albania’s digital public services from the users’ point of view.
Twenty-eight people took part in this project, including persons with disabilities, older people, rural residents, young people, women with caregiving responsibilities, and people with limited digital confidence.
Using their own phones and computers, they submitted 67 anonymous records of their attempts to receive government services online. The testing framework covered 17 public institutions and platforms. This was an exploratory exercise, not a representative survey or technical accessibility audit.
What came back was more complicated than a list of services that work and services that do not.
One participant tried to download a family certificate through the e-Albania platform. The identification code arrived neither on her phone nor by email. She encountered the same problem with a Civil Status process. As she was outside Albania, she was careful not to conclude that the platform itself was necessarily responsible. From the user’s perspective, however, the result was simple: The process stopped, with no obvious way forward.
When “completed” does not mean “easy”
Of the 67 test records, 57 were marked as completed independently, four with assistance, and six as not completed. Taken alone, those figures could give the impression of a largely frictionless experience.
Other answers tell a more complicated story. Ten records mention assistance or an attempt to obtain it. Five selected “no problem” while also identifying another barrier. Seven attempts lasted more than 30 minutes, and three ended with the participant giving up.
In other words, “completed” and “accessible” are not necessarily the same thing.
The most frequently reported specific problem was unclear instructions. Participants also encountered authentication difficulties, platforms that didn’t work well on their devices, difficult navigation, broken links or buttons, and problems uploading or downloading documents.
Some of the most revealing difficulties were not technical at all. On the Albanian Parliament website, one participant eventually found what she wanted, but only after navigating terminology that seemed to assume familiarity with parliamentary language. Citizens generally know what they need. They do not necessarily know what the institution calls it.
On the National Employment and Skills Agency (AKPA) website, she wanted to explore a vacancy or vocational training course but was asked to create an account. That raised another question: Why should someone need to identify themselves simply to browse information that could be public and freely accessible?
Finding information about registering a business through the National Business Center (QKB) was also less intuitive than expected.
More broadly, moving between institutions meant learning different systems: different menus, terminology, navigation, and interaction logic. Instead of feeling like different doors into the same public administration, they could feel like unrelated products.
When somebody else becomes part of the process
The testing also looked at what happens when citizens cannot manage alone.
Some participants reported turning to family members. Others received help from an institutional employee, a stationery shop or internet café, or another person. One sought help and still could not complete the process.
This matters because bringing in another person can expose a person’s private credentials, documents, or personal information. More fundamentally, a supposedly direct interaction between citizen and state becomes dependent on somebody else’s skills and availability.
The sample is too small to tell us how widespread this is in Albania. But it shows how easily digital access can become mediated rather than independent.
What makes a service feel simple?
Not every experience was difficult. One participant found the euro exchange rate through the Bank of Albania almost immediately. Downloading a form from the General Directorate of Taxation worked well, while finding a recent item on the Radio Televizioni Shqiptar (RTSH), a national broadcasting platform, was straightforward.
That contrast is useful. The purpose of the exercise was not to prove that Albania’s digital public services fail, or to rank institutions. It was to understand why some interactions require almost no explanation, while others place much of the work on the citizen.
The findings will now feed into an analytical report, a public digital dashboard, and practical recommendations. They also point towards questions that require further investigation.
How consistently are accessibility standards applied? How do services work with assistive technologies? How often does an apparently successful digital interaction actually involve somebody else sitting beside the citizen?
Moving a service online is relatively easy to see and count. Understanding whether people can actually use it independently is harder.
The test is no longer simply whether the state is online. It is whether citizens can actually reach it.
This activity/article is supported by the CIVICUS Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI).
Dr. Aida Ciro, Albania, September 2026.
