In the framework of Public Administration Week 2026, the activity titled “Shape Albania’s European Future” was held today — a dialogue on the role of public administration in the process of the country’s transformation and European integration.
Prime Minister Edi Rama also attended the event, where he appreciated the contribution of public administration professionals in implementing transformative reforms and emphasized the importance of building strong institutions, modernizing the administration, and using technology and artificial intelligence as key instruments for accelerating reforms and improving services to citizens.
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Prime Minister Edi Rama: Greetings to everyone! The transformation of the administration is an extraordinarily complex process, extraordinarily difficult, and one that requires something that the world today, and even more so Albania today and Albanians today, have less of: it requires time.
It requires time because it is about creating mechanisms that are connected to people, to many people. And I believe that if we go back for a moment and remember that the first fundamental law of our public administration was approved nearly a decade ago, then we can understand what transformation has taken place in our civil service. And for all those who follow us, it is important to make the distinction. When we speak about public administration, we have in mind the civil service, which includes around 4,000, well, there are more than that, but in any case, fewer than 10,000, while in the overall number of the administration we have tens of thousands of others who are part of the state administration. So, it is not the same level, and this is not something unique to Albania; it is the case in many countries.
If in the public administration, where all that human resource is found that has enabled us to make exemplary progress with the negotiation process, we today have a new quality, in the state administration we today have a very great challenge before citizens, because citizens have every right to be much more demanding and to be treated much better in many cases.
Since we are at a specific, intensive moment in our journey as a society, allow me to bring here one episode from many episodes that we are collecting in order to properly read the boulevard protest, in that part of it where that protest has fundamental importance for us, which is the voice and the real concerns of citizens. So, what I call the clean and flowing water of the protest beneath that black crust of what, unfortunately, is the noisy and visible part where all the failures and the angry people of Albania have gathered. In that great flow of people, there is much to learn, and the episode is this. The mother of a friend of mine is a little younger than I am, but she is a grandmother, had gone out to protest. And her son told me that he was alarmed when they told him that his mother had gone to the protest. He was alarmed because she is of a certain age and imagining her in the middle of a crowd of people, the first thing that comes to mind is that if, God forbid, she trips or falls, she could also suffer physical injury. And he returned home very alarmed and asked his mother, “But you, what did you do at the protest, what did you go to the protest for?” And his mother tells him what I believe, also seeing other episodes that we are collecting, is the essence of the anger of many people with the state administration. For one reason or another, I do not remember well now of what state nature, she has to go periodically to the polyclinic, and since there are others like her who know the practice followed by the doctor who has to care for them, people go there as early as 5, as early as 6 in the morning. Why? Because they wait for the doctor to come and hope that, by being ahead in the queue, they will have the opportunity for him to see them, because the doctor, first of all, does not come on time; he always comes one hour, two hours late. So those people wait from 5 or 6 in the morning until 9 or 10, elderly people. Secondly, the doctor does not stay until the end of working hours, but after treating three or four of them, he leaves.
And this elderly woman, a grandmother, goes out to protest because she is insulted, and insulted is in fact a mild word, because an insult happens once; this is humiliation. And the feeling of humiliation by your state, by the people who are paid to serve you, is a feeling that, if you make even a very small effort to put yourself in that position, you understand that it is the height of it.
And people do not feel insulted and humiliated simply and only because they cannot resolve a problem, because not every problem can be resolved administratively, because we have seen that many problems require judicial solutions, because the administration cannot become a court. Because if the administration became a court, if the government became a court, if the Prime Minister became a judge, then he could do five good things, but he could also do five thousand bad things. And for this reason, things are separated. But beyond the fact of whether it resolves it or does not resolve it, that doctor is not obliged by law or by custom to cure an incurable disease, but that doctor is obliged to offer the sick person all the comfort that comes from humanity. The lack of humanity is a lack that people are not willing to tolerate, and rightly so. And naturally, these are not the majority, fortunately, because we do not content ourselves only with what we see, as some think, with what we see in reports.
We make efforts to understand how administration functions even when it is outside our attention.
How a hospital functions even when it is not me going there for a visit or inspection and everyone there gets prepared because the Prime Minister, or the minister, is coming. And with the anti-corruption structure and with the help of other mechanisms, the minister follows the progress of these relations also through visits and controls that are completely unannounced. And it does not result in hospitals that the norm or the normal situation is what I said about that doctor, but that does not matter. It does not matter because it is enough for it to happen to someone; there is no need for all the people who have something to say to be “dragged along.” It is enough for “one person to be dragged along,” as happened in that scandalous moment, and this resonates with others, because this mother, this grandmother, is not physically dragged, but in that person who is dragged there, she feels part of it, because meanwhile it is this doctor here who “drags along” her and her peers, who, by God’s right and by the right given to them by the fact that they have contributed to this country, ask for that minimal service.
Now, to observe this is important; to be aware of it is just as important, and for me personally, being aware of what people live through is the most important thing. For this reason, I am always making efforts to look from outside the narrow circle that can then close you in, and then you no longer understand where you are. But acting to change this is much more complex than may be thought, because it is not a matter of immediate reaction, just as the fight against corruption is not simply a matter of prison or hanging by rope, as recently this too has begun to be generated, understandably, by segments that have nothing to do with that very long straight line that makes up all the components of this moment.
The system must protect you, and precisely what is happening today in Albania, and what gets lost in the fog and smoke of many things that come together, is that the system, for the first time, is fighting corruption. So, it is completely the opposite of what is being said in vain. The system is fighting corruption and not voluntarism here and there, which naturally is very painful, which naturally is like a stab in everyone’s eye, creating disturbance, creating disgust, creating filth, the feeling of filth, because in fact this thing is happening.
Entry is being made where no entry has ever been made, since the creation of the Albanian state, and this is not a reason to ask for the guillotine, because all the systems that in the end ended up in “hell” for the peoples who became exalted by the idea of immediate justice and went toward the bullet to the forehead or the guillotine have taught us that this path of democracy, of the balancing of powers, and of building a system that guarantees everyone — and even guarantees the accused — is the only way to guarantee generations.
Why am I going on at length on this point? Because I want to be very clear with everyone from my experience. I believe that today I have the possibility, from the summit of this experience, which is now quite many years old, to say that at the end of the day, what is important for state-building is not the episode, but the entirety of the steps that are taken with patience and without noise.
Noisy episodes help in one way or another, but they do not make the system. And my belief as to why Albania can overcome, with an unusual speed, what is the necessary time to build the system, is connected only to one fact: the fact that Albania today has the fortune to live in the age of technology and artificial intelligence.
France — the ambassador is there — has one of the most structured public administrations on the planet; it has one of the most complex mechanisms of state functioning. But to get there, France “cut heads” and “spilled rivers of blood,” burned itself, destroyed itself and others for many, many times.
And the same is true for all the countries that today are at the forefront of the way the state functions. They come from very far away; they come from extraordinary experiences of state-building. We are in the embryo stage, and we seek today to be a country that is accepted into the European Union because it has an administration of EU standards. This is a dizzying challenge.
But we have digitalization, which, for example, did a very great thing for us that people today have forgotten and that today the overwhelming part of young people who feel ignored or who feel the need to protest do not even know existed. Digitalization removed the queues for us to get a piece of paper, and it removed the queues for us to get a piece of paper by giving us the opportunity to become — because now everyone is becoming one — one of the first countries with the largest number of services obtained from the phone.
Digitalization made it possible for all those who are outside the country to have their state at their service from the phone, and not to wait to come for holidays in order to go and stand in queues to get a piece of paper, as happened in the past. Until a few years ago, the summer holidays of emigrants were between the beach and the queues at counters where they crowded to get those documents they were missing.
A few days ago, Adea, I do not know, I think she mentioned it, the titanic work of the “ants” was completed to digitalize the Cadaster, to digitalize the records, to digitalize the documentation, the maps, with the support of the European Union and within the deadline set according to the New Growth Plan and the deadline we have set for ourselves regarding the negotiations.
Now comes the next phase, the phase of building the system that will finally make the Cadastre the same as all the other services that today are no longer a problem because you obtain them online. And this nightmare of the Cadastre, which comes because of many oddities that have happened in this country, but which, unlike how it seems, requires ant-like work to gather all the pieces and fragments of many, many distorted processes, will leave the lives of Albanians. And today, Albania is working to have the first artificial intelligence model to carry out public procurement from A to Z, because pieces exist, but a complex model does not exist. And we are working with several major powers in the world of technology to realize this product, which, in the event that it is successful, and I believe it will be successful, will begin to be tested in the middle of next year, with the aim of entering fully into operation in 2028. But when it is effective, it will finally remove the entire problem of tenders and contracts for public funds, finally! It will make it zero! But imagine if technology did not exist; do you think that today we would have been able to remove the queues with education? You can change as many parties as you want, you can change as many prime ministers as you want, you can change as many ministers as you want, you can change as many directors as you want; sustainable improvements come only from the system. The people who are entrusted with these duties are distinguished only here: those who believe in the system and works for the system, and who does not understand at all the importance of the system.
From my side, this is what I believe is the essence of the entire effort we are making today, and it must do precisely with the system. And all the changes made to the law aim at this, while certainly technology will help a great deal also in many other aspects that have to do with areas that are vulnerable in terms of quality, such as healthcare, such as education. Today we have a series of processes in education that are no longer a problem.
The state Matura exam was held, and nothing was heard. None of those things that used to be heard before, when there was a big uproar! Why? Because in our education system, many parts are now consolidated mechanisms, and this is the process of membership in the European Union. This is what the negotiations do. This is what the continuous interaction with the European Commission does: the system.
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Prime Minister Edi Rama: It is not that anything remained unsaid within the framework of this first discussion, but I would re-emphasize the necessity of a continuous increase of technological capacities in the administration.
We have just started a new phase, where currently 140 senior civil servants of the administration, in our ministries, have entered an artificial intelligence program and will serve as the first group of a process that will then extend naturally also to other institutions, in order to increase speed, to increase the capacity of decision-making and the quality of judgment in taking a decision, and meanwhile to create what is also the magic of artificial intelligence: an increasingly broader administrative knowledge every day for the administration of the internal processes of institutions and for the meaningful and necessary increase of the quality of interaction between institutions.
I believe that the impact of this program will begin to be felt not in a long time; it will begin to be felt relatively quickly, and the quality of acts, the quality of assessments will increase considerably, giving us at the same time the possibility to have much more reliable monitoring of every internal process of the administration.
I believe that all these will help us greatly ,in the process of concluding the negotiations, and I hope that all these will also help greatly at that weak point which, at certain moments, becomes extraordinarily sensitive: the direct relationship of citizens with the administration.
