In 2020, the State Social Protection Fund under the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of Population of Azerbaijan, hereafter referred to the Fund, launched a centralization policy to increase the quality and flexibility of business processes in social security, facilitate access to services rendered to the population and ensure transparency, and increase citizen satisfaction. In this regard, a number of institutional decisions on centralization of the Fund’s activities were made to eliminate existing problems and challenges and radically reconstruct and improve social security governance.
One of the main goals of the centralization policy is related to the transition to a service model, i.e. the Fund has targeted the transition from “an administrative entity” approach to “a citizen-servicing” model.
The centralization policy allowed citizens to clarify their information on the basis of their access to social benefits on the principle of one-stop-shop as an individual approach through e-services, and created a basis to make the social benefit assignment targeted as well as more efficient and transparent.
Within the centralization policy, specialized central branches of the Fund were established to fulfil the Fund’s functions from a single centre.