Institutional and public communication
What if modernity were, at last, about putting people back at the heart of public service?
How to turn an administrative nightmare into
an almost pleasant experience
(The Method, Not the Miracle)
There’s a national pastime in Cameroon that no ministry will ever acknowledge: the administrative obstacle course. Getting up at 6 a.m., standing in line under the sun, a stiff yellow folder in hand, only to have the secretary
tell you that “the boss is on a break” at 9 a.m.
We all know someone who’s wasted a day sometimes a week just to get a simple stamp. So when a public institution comes to us to “go digital,” the temptation is strong to just slap its coat of arms on a website and cross our fingers. But it doesn’t work that way.
Read, map out, simplify
Step one: read. Everything. Decrees, orders, circulars, forms. Dive into administrative law the way you’d dive into a bowl of hot okok not for fun, but because you have to understand before you can simplify.
Step two: we map out the journey. Not the civil servant’s journey the citizen’s. We identify every point of friction, every moment when the user loses interest, every document that can be digitized, and those that must remain in physical form.
Step Three: We prototype. We build a simplified version, test it with real users, and make adjustments. Because a journey that seems obvious in a meeting room can turn into a nightmare in front of a screen.
Embers need their crossroads; the digital world needs its human touch.
The 360° approach, or why a website alone isn’t enough
Even a perfect platform is useless if no one knows about it. That’s where the 360° approach comes in: explanatory videos, visuals, social media carousels, radio spots, a dedicated call center, and media partnerships.
We saw this with eWorkPermit: the platform is just one piece of the puzzle. What drives adoption is the communication surrounding the explanatory videos, the reassuring radio spots, and the call center that answers the questions no one dares to ask online.
Because beyond simply delivering a service, it’s the way we communicate it that drives adoption, informs users, and builds trust. A citizen who understands the process no longer feels like they’re just going through the motions they feel supported.
Those on the ground know the terrain
We didn’t bring in experts from the other side of the world. A local agency that handles both design and coding already understands the terrain, the habits, and the real roadblocks. And that changes everything.
When technical rigor meets a deep understanding of local norms, the result is projects that work and don’t look like copy-and-paste templates from elsewhere. Digital technology has made bureaucracy more fluid. If that isn’t proof that nothing is impossible anymore, we don’t know what will convince you.