A focus group with six women and in-depth interviews with five showed how this plays out in practice: lack of coordination between institutions, repeated visits, carrying documents between institutions although the law obliges institutions to exchange them, and reliance on blogs and lawyers’ websites in the absence of clear instructions. All of this comes at an emotionally and financially demanding moment, in a change experienced as deeply identity-related.

To address these problems, the WeBER Policy Lab brought CEP together with the Public Policy Secretariat, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Office for IT and eGovernment. At a design thinking workshop on 29 May 2025, the participants co-created two prototypes – a unified e-service on the Portal and a unified request form for one-stop shops – and agreed that any solution must be accompanied by an authoritative guidebook for citizens, in print and digital form and written in simplified language. Although the research, the co-created design and donor resources were in place, testing and production have been postponed due to the prolonged political crisis.

The workshop for Modeling and Simulation of an Integrated Service for Document Changes Due to a Change of Surname.