Kosovo citizens who want to report a broken streetlight or an illegal construction site often face a confusing and unresponsive bureaucracy. A new web application called Kosovo.report is aiming to change that by automatically routing complaints to the correct institutions on their behalf and showing live response rates by government agencies.
Sbunker, an independent media organization from Kosovo focused on providing analytical views on political, economic, social, and cultural issues, is developing Kosovo.report with the support of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, through North Macedonia’s Metamorphosis Foundation.
Making reporting easy
Reporting local issues in Kosovo can be affected by structural challenges within public administrations. According to SIGMA’s Public Administration in Kosovo 2024 report, public service delivery remains fragmented, with uneven implementation of administrative reforms and varying levels of capacity across institutions.
Similarly, research on citizen perception of public services in Kosovo highlights inconsistencies in administrative procedures and digital services across municipalities, which can make public services less predictable for citizens.
Additionally, analysis by Open Data Kosovo on local government openness points to ongoing challenges in transparency, communication with citizens, and municipal accountability. Together, these factors can make it difficult for citizens to identify the appropriate institution or reporting channel when facing local problems.
Kosovo.report aims to address this by simplifying the reporting process and automatically routing complaints to the relevant authority.
The process is designed to be simple and quick. Users open the app, choose a category such as infrastructure, environment, or public services, add a photo and location, and submit the report in a few steps.
When a citizen reports an illegal construction site, the system must determine whether the municipality or the inspectorate holds responsibility. When a citizen reports a damaged road, the system must identify which municipality maintains that road. The functionality is what distinguishes the application from a simple email form.
Enhancing communication between citizens and public institutions
At this stage of the project, Sbunker will begin consultations with municipalities and other public institutions to explore how they can participate in the platform and contribute to making citizen reporting more accessible and effective.
These discussions will help identify practical ways to connect institutions with the application and ensure that the platform meets the needs of citizens and public authorities.
The long-term goal of this application is to create a tool that simplifies communication and supports more transparent interactions between citizens and public institutions in Kosovo.
The application is designed for all Kosovo citizens, with a particular attention to groups that are often excluded from digital services: Older citizens, people with lower digital literacy, and the Serbian-speaking minority community. The entire interface will function in both Albanian and Serbian.
The platform will also include a public dashboard displaying information such as the number of reports received by each participating institution, the percentage of reports that receive a response, and the average time required to address reported issues.
The goal is to provide citizens with insight into how public institutions handle civic complaints and encourage transparency.
The application aims to register over 2,000 users and process around 1,000 submitted reports, with at least 15 percent of reports submitted in Serbian, by the end of the project in October 2026.
Furthermore, the complete codebase will be published as open source on GitHub, so municipalities and organizations in the Western Balkans can adapt the platform for their own use.
For Sbunker, this project presents an opportunity to create a digital application that directly responds to citizens’ needs. With Kosovo.report: We are building a tool that gives people a straightforward way to report civic problems and have those reports reach the right institutions.
