Building Bridges: Strengthening Governance Trust through Digital Service Design

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Redesigning how public services are delivered in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao - making them more inclusive, efficient, and accessible for all - through civic service design.

Partners:

• United Nations Development Programme Philippines
• Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) Ministry of Interior and Local Government (MILG)

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Project Duration: 2020-2022

Capabilities Delivered:

Seeing Systems - Narrative & Power Mapping, Cross-sector Learning Lab

Designing Change - Digital Civic Service Design, Digital Service, Learning Experience Design, Service Design Leadership & Capacity Development, Design Research, and Weaving Experiences of Place & People.

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The  Landscape

In many parts of the Bangsamoro region, civic services are hard to access— due to distance, limited digital infrastructure, and fragmented processes. Over time, these challenges have eroded citizens’ trust in local governance. To strengthen this relationship, BARMM needed a new approach—a Braver Governance by Design. A systems approach that puts people’s welfare at the center of service delivery.

The Challenge

How might service delivery be reimagined so that people experience government not as distant and difficult, but as responsive, accessible, and human-centered?

• Accessibility: Long travel distances and high transaction costs made access to basic services difficult to obtain. To address this, the project aimed to deliver delight and efficiency in Time, Cost, and Number of Visits saved in accessing public services..
  
  
• Trust: Many citizens felt intimidated or excluded from government processes. We reframed this as an opportunity for the civic servants to communicate empathy in providing service.
  
  
• COVID-19 Restrictions (2020–2022): During the three-year project engagement, pandemic restrictions limited in-person workshops and training, creating significant challenges for participant engagement. Nevertheless, KindMind successfully delivered workshops and training sessions, engaging participants who acquired valuable knowledge, underwent empathy training, and strengthened their skills in civic service.
  
  

The KindMind Lens

KindMind, in collaboration with UNDP Philippines and the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government (MILG), partnered with local governments in Lanao del Sur to pilot a redesigned civic service process that places collective flourishing at the center.

What does this look like in practice?

1. Services as Bridges, not Barriers. In BARMM, where governance has historically been fragile and trust uneven, civic service design means turning services into bridges of peace and belonging. It’s not just about delivery, but about making government felt, visible, and reliable in people’s everyday lives.

2. Co-Designing with Communities. KindMind frames services not as top-down programs but as shared architectures of care:

• Barangay leaders, women’s groups, youth, faith actors, and LGUs are brought in early.
• Co-creation workshops become spaces of civic dialogue, surfacing local narratives, griefs, and aspirations.
• Services are tested in the “everyday journeys” of citizens, not just in offices.

3. Embedding a Systemic Practice.  Civic service design in BARMM

• Framed problems systemically (seeing interlinked issues)
• Experimenting with prototypes (rapid, small-scale service interventions tested in municipalities).
• Building adaptive capacity so LGUs can continuously learn, adjust, and sustain reforms.

4. Grounding in BARMM Realities.

• Conflict sensitivity: services must avoid exacerbating divides, and instead foster inclusion.
• Cultural rootedness: services draw from Maranao, Maguindanaon, and Tausug traditions of governance, reciprocity, and community care.
  
  
• Ecological attunement: given the vulnerability to floods and resource depletion, every civic service is a chance to strengthen resilience.
  
  

To lay the right foundation from the very beginning, KindMind applied its Braver Governance by Design systemic approach. In close collaboration with UNDP and MILG, this led to a reframing and redesign of core service systems—covering identity, prosperity, eligibility, and mobility—ensuring that governance is not only efficient, but also equitable, people-centered, and future-ready.

Overarching Framework
The Digital Service Design Lab (DSDL) follows the KindMind Service Design framework, which treats civic service delivery like a staged event. Each service is broken down into steps, actions, channels, evidence, time/cost/visits, onstage (visible interactions), backstage (support processes), tools/systems, and policies—allowing services to be mapped, simplified, and redesigned for better user experience.

DSDL in 2020
Season 1 focused on building capacity by training government personnel in human-centered service design. Outputs included empathy training, research safari, discovery workshops, creation of simplified blueprints for four pilot services, localization of toolkits, and providing oversight for newly trained service designers. DSDL 1.0 focused on the simplification to enhance the efficiency of the following key civic services - Birth Certificate, Business Permit, Barangay Eligibility, and Travel Authority.

DSDL in 2021-2022

Building on Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 expanded the Training of Trainers (ToT) to additional LGUs and ministries while deepening the skills of earlier cohorts. Both cycles included:

• A Team Volt-In that focused on strengthening team cohesion, leadership and program accountability;
• Service Design Training-of-Trainers
• Service Design workshops to translate insights into prototypes;
• Service blueprinting and building of low-fidelity prototypes.

Each season also ended with a Team Retrospective to evaluate facilitation performance and identify program improvements.

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The Systemic Impact

Through the project, enhanced systemic and cultural shifts in BARMM governance emerged:

• From Curriculum to Experience: Enabling Civic Service Design in Action
  
  • Tailored for BARMM, the curriculum, manuals, and learning experiences ensured cultural relevance, accessibility, and applicability to real governance challenges. Participants engaged in hybrid, multisensory sessions to build leadership, team synergy, and inclusive participation. Through empathy training, fieldwork, and co-design workshops, civil servants collaborated with communities to understand user needs and reimagine more effective, simplified service delivery

• Scaling Civic Service Design Leaders and Trainers in BARMM
  
  
  • A cohort of skilled practitioners, leaders, and trainers was equipped with empathy-driven, citizen-centered approaches to apply across local and national institutions. Through Training of Trainers sessions, representatives from LGUs, national government agencies, and civil society gained practical knowledge and skills to embed human-centered service design in daily operations.

In total, 12 representatives from the LGUs, 11 ministries, select members of parliament, and civil society groups (including the Bangsamoro Women’s Commission and Moropreneurs)were trained to become civic service design champions.

• Simplified Public Services Blueprint
  
  
  • Service access and delivery were transformed to better serve the public, particularly for priority services:

Through a series of service design workshops, community insights were translated into prototypes and continuously evaluated through Team Retrospectives. Localized toolkits and step-by-step manuals were created, equipping frontline staff with practical resources rooted in the lived experiences of the communities they serve. Building on these efforts, co-creation sessions informed the development of the “BARMM at Your Service” digital portal, providing a centralized platform that makes essential government services more accessible, transparent, and responsive to the diverse needs of the region.

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• Cultural Shifts
  
  
  • Civil servants shifted from merely enforcing procedures to becoming stewards of the citizen experience, fostering a more empathetic and responsive approach to governance. Citizens who once felt excluded began to feel recognized and reassured, gaining a sense of belonging in the decision-making process. By adopting a whole-of-system perspective, hidden bottlenecks were uncovered and new opportunities for collaboration emerged, enabling more effective and inclusive service delivery.

The Systemic Agenda

By reframing service delivery through lived experience and designing governance around collective well-being, the region is moving toward systems where public services are not only available, but truly accessible. Through systems thinking, co-creation, and civic service design, KindMind demonstrates how people-centered innovation can bridge public and private sectors—advancing resilience, equity, and sustainable development.

SDG 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16
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About the Program

The Digital Service Design Lab aims to transform how we deliver services and information to the public with the help of digital channels. The lab will introduce digital service design to public servants and enable continuous practice in using these methods to transform the provision of services - digitally and beyond.

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