Balady is a digital platform currently providing more than 200 digital services related to municipal services, city infrastructure, and urban enhancement. It supports business and improves the lives of citizens, by providing services and promoting activities that are innovative for business and empower the community.
The main objectives of the platform are to provide digital services to regulate and manage businesses activities and infrastructure in cities, allow all stakeholders to contribute to innovation in digital services by proper change management for services, allow the community to share opinions and vote for drafts of updated and newly generated regulations and to capture and send any issues in city infrastructure and municipal services, promote partnerships between the government and the private sector and to build accurate information related to business, investment opportunities, land, and geographic data of business activities.
Balady has more than 3 million active users and counts more than 80 million logged operations. It counts more than 1 million community contributions in capturing city issues, with 98% of them solved, and allowed to increase satisfaction with municipal services to 95%. Balady has also been contributing to greatly improving the efficiency of bureaucratic processes, optimizing regulatory procedures, and supporting business growth.

https://www.balady.gov.sa/

• Saudi Arabia

• Youth
• Women
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• All businesses / All people age from 18 and above.

Most of the solution components can be replicated, but need customization based on each region or country’s regulations. Most countries all over the world need to provide digital services for municipal and construction services, visual distortion elimination, community participation in urban enhancement and sustainably. In this context, integration with several government entities, which was applied successfully in the Balady Platform, may also be applied in other countries. However, they might differ and require different setups and customization regarding the type of services, coverage, data, integration, and other features.
This solution was built in-house in the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and has some copyright restrictions in terms of source code, and needs agreement if it is needed to be replicated in other countries. However, any other country can build a similar solution to achieve similar objectives.

Balady is a sustainable project and no major challenges in that regard are expected in the future. The sustainability of the project is based on the fact that the project is built in-house with owned source code and therefore is not dependent on external support. Balady also benefits from a high variety and quality of human resources with a well-defined structure and clear division of responsibilities. It includes product managers, project managers, business analysts, developers, designers, quality testers, and security, operations, and support teams. The project is also gradually being open-sourced with some features uploaded to the governmental platform for open-source.
Balady also is supported by The Supreme Committee for Digital Transformation in MOMRAH, which has the minister of municipal and rural affairs and housing as the head of committee and has members of top management in MOMRAH. Also , Balady has defined business owners for each service and sub process in in the ministry agencies and business owners representatives in all 17 main regional municipalities. For all these stakeholders, decision support dashboard was built online to show live analytics data to monitors services growth and support decision and enabling more sustainability for Balady platform.

Balady platform promotes inclusion, engagement and transparency in the community by using several channels to provide information and services to citizens like the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs website, the Balady platform, Twitter accounts, and the YouTube channel. It enables digital services that support the values of ICT digital transformation in government by providing services 24/7. The platform is aligned with the WSIS C1 Action Line on the role of governments and all stakeholders in promoting ICTs for development. It uses artificial intelligence and data analytics to generate statistical solutions, facilitate decision-making, request classifications by artificial intelligence image recognition, service demand optimisation, and enhancement. Balady also holds information on all active businesses in all regions, issuing instance licensing and renewals and allowing businesses to self-check online their business compliance to reduce fines and violations and improve their service quality. It partners with several government organisations in terms of data integration. Balady regulates and inspects the food business, factories and restaurants, which underpins SDG 2. Furthermore, Balady ensures healthy lives and promotes well-being for all ages by issuing health certificates for business employees to ensure healthy food and services for consumers. This is directly linked to SDG 3. In addition, Balady provides gender equality by allowing males and females to get the same digital services at all levels and empowering women and girls by starting businesses from home, which promotes equality and supports SDG 5. And by providing instant business activities licenses in all kingdoms of Saudi Arabia regions with self-business compliance checks and QR codes on each business location to allow people to rate service and send compliance, it supports SDG 8 to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth.