The Millennium Challenge Account Moldova, the Ministry of Environment and the e-Governance Center signed today a cooperation agreement on the design of the Common Platform for Water Use Authorization, which will allow for putting in place a one-stop shop for issuance of authorizations and will reduce significantly the time needed to issue water use authorizations.
The common platform for water use authorization will be an IT system that will help manage the receipt and processing of applications and issuance of environment authorization for special water use and due to this system individuals and businesses will no longer have to go through difficult, expensive and lasting procedures.
The Minister of Environment Gheorghe Salaru announced that this platform will spare the people from going to various entities to get the water use authorizations, which will facilitate businesses.
Valentina Badrajan, the MCA Moldova Executive Director, communicated that the Moldovan businessmen complained that it takes from several months up to one year to receive water use authorizations. The common platform for water use authorization will reduce significantly the time needed to process the applications for water use authorizations and their issuance. It will also cut the red-tape and increase the transparency in issuance of water use authorizations. Additionally to this platform, a hydrologic modeling platform will be designed with the MCA Moldova support, which will be integrated with the water use authorization platform to enable the authorities leading the management of water resources in Moldova to calculate more accurately and quickly the available water for various sectors of the national economy.
Stela Mocan, the Executive Director of the e-Governance Center, added that the bidding for contracting the company that will design the common platform is underway. This platform is expected to be designed by the next summer, and put into operation in the autumn of next year. This electronic system will be part of the Government registers and authorizations platform, she stressed.
According to the agreement signed by the three entities, the e-Governance Center will be in charge of contracting a company that will design the platform, while the Millennium Challenge Account Moldova will deliver equipment to public authorities necessary to digitize the files of the beneficiary applying for environment authorization for water special use and relevant training.
The Ministry of Environment, which will manage the platform, will ensure its functionality, by creating the one-stop shop for issuance of environment authorizations for water special use and development of the required regulatory framework.
Putting in place this platform is one of the objectives of the Millennium Challenge Compact aimed at improving the technical capacities of the Moldovan Government for sustainable management of water resources and is in line with the Water Law. The common platform will provide an efficient and transparent framework that will mitigate corruption in issuance of special water use authorizations.
