PDA’s Citizen Experience team conducts field research and tests digital services with farmers, putting citizens at the centre of service design
Islamabad
The Pakistan Digital Authority’s (PDA) Citizen Experience (CX) team conducted field research in Bhera, Sargodha district, to explore use cases identified for the agriculture sector, working directly with the farmers who stand to benefit most from its digitisation.
Citizen experience is a central part of PDA’s mandate under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025. Along with leading Pakistan’s digital transformation and building the National Digital Masterplan, PDA is working towards reinventing government services and making them citizen-centric.
Public services should be designed around the needs of the people, which is why PDA has reached out to farmers to learn how digital agricultural services would be used in practice, so they can be structured to deliver the most value. The CX team spoke to farmers to understand the challenges behind each identified agriculture use case and observed them using the Mera Kissan and e-Zarkhaiz portals, to see from the user’s perspective where each process works and where it stalls. These conversations brought up practical problems that desk research could not have captured.
The team travels next to Gujranwala to repeat the exercise with farming communities there.
Field research is how PDA puts citizen centricity into practice. Rather than designing digital services centrally and handing them to citizens to adjust later, PDA will build feedback from farmers directly into the agriculture component of the masterplan. PDA’s citizen-focused research will help design services that are more likely to be adopted.
Findings from Bhera, Gujranwala and the districts that follow will be documented and used to refine the agriculture use cases and the services built on them.
