Improvement of consular services to Belgian citizens abroad (CONSUNET)

Belgium has about 135 embassies and consulate abroad. One of their many tasks is to serve as "townhall" for the more than 300.000 belgians who live abroad and, in case of emergency, for the more than 1.000.000 belgian tourists who temporarily leave their country to travel. CONSUNET offers the possibility for the consulates to get online access to the central register of belgians and to offer the same service as townhalls in Belgium.

Policy Context

Over 300.000 belgian live abroad. They rely on the local belgian representations for alle kinds of administrative services : registration in the national register, passports, identity card, participation in elections, legalisation of documents, mariages, etc... Before the introduction of CONSUNET, each embassy and consulate had their own database whith no online connection to a central database in Brussels. All data had to be sent to Brussels where they were manually treated and from their all information was encoded in the national register. The new systems allows all posts to access the central database in Brussels, to keep an exact copy of all data concerning their post on a local server (for reasons of business continuity) and to get an online access to the national register (nationaal register), which is operated by the Ministry of Interior. As a consequence, the embassies and consulates, as well as the central services of the Department of Foreign Affairs now have the same consolidated information of all belgians living abroad. This has proven very usefull in case of crisis like tsunamis or earthquakes, where the ministry has to be able to respond very quickly. The direct access to the national register has proven to be very helpfull for tourists, who are not required to register themselves in an embassy or consulate but who will require services form those posts in case of emergency (loss of passport, accident, etc...)

Description of target users and groups

Targetgroups : consular workers in the 135 belgian embassies and consulate >300.000 belgian living abroad an a permanent basis >1.000.000 tourists who travel abroad

Description of the way to implement the initiative

No partnerships. Multi-channel issues: The application has been developped in such a way that embassies and consulates are not totally dependant on the availabilty of a connection with the headquarters in Belgium. In cases the line whith Brussels is down, they're always able to continue working a local copie of the database, which is synchronised with the central database in Brussel a few times every hour. As soon as the line comes up again, all processes which need online access are executed automatically.

Main results, benefits and impacts

* better knowledge of the number of belgians living abroad * higher level of participation in elections * faster deliverance of documents (ex. passport) * higher quality of service, since data can be reused * more security for belgians living in high risk areas abroad (in case of evacuation) * less workload for the civil servants in the embassies and consulates Innovation: .

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

The CONSUNET application is now the basis for further developpement of other applications that follow the same priciple : local database abroad, central database in Brussel and, if required, synchronisation with further databases in the backoffice. Examples : the application for the deliverance of visa to foreigners who want to come to Belgium will be based on the same principles and technologies.

Lessons learnt

* use a agile approach for analysis and developpement : obtain buy in by giving the costumer parts of the application as soon as they are developped. Don't wait until the application is completly ready * don't give the costumer more than he can handle * IT has to go to the costumer (even if he's abroad) rather than have the costumer come to IT Scope: International