The Deputy Ministry for Research, Innovation and Digital Policy aims to bring the state and state services to a mobile phone screen or a computer monitor, Deputy Minister Kyriacos Kokkinos has said.

“We are only in the beginning, we have a huge amount of work before us but with confidence and the experience we’ve gained the effort will be easier,” Kokkinos said on Monday briefing the parliamentary committee on Finance and Budgetary Affairs on the Deputy Ministry's €118-million budget for 2022.

Kokkinos said that the existence of the Deputy Ministry amid the pandemic was decisive in tackling the Covid crisis, recalling that a total of 1.2 million digital covid certificates have been issued, while the vaccination portal had processed more than 600,000 appointments, the call centre for pandemic answered over 3,000 calls per day, while Cyprus flight pass uses exceeded 2.3 million.

He also recalled that amid the pandemic, the Deputy Ministry in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour had digitised the Social Insurance Services, ending the long queues, as 566,000 payments were digitally processed with payments over €1,2 billion in nine months.

According to Kokkinos the majority of state allowances will be processed digitally by the end of 2022. By the end of this year, the allowances for sick leave, unemployment, motherhood, widows and pension will be submitted digitally, while later the allowances for labour, funeral, fatherhood, thalassaemia, orphans and minimum guaranteed income will also be digitised.

According to Kokkinos, one of Cyprus’ most important systems will be the school management system that will unite schools, with the parents and the Ministry of Education in one platform enabling parents to know their children’s performance, grades and absences.

Concerning the citizens' digital skills, Kokkinos said “our beacon is the horizon 2030 set out by the EU,” noting that Cyprus cannot lag behind.