Vice President Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang is expected to launch a new book on July 8, 2026, that calls for a major rethink of public service delivery in Ghana by placing the citizen’s experience at the centre of reform.

Titled Citizen Experience: A Reset for Superior Public and Civil Service Delivery, the book is co-authored by Chief of Staff Julius K. Debrah and marketing professor Robert E. Hinson.

It argues that African governments, including Ghana, have spent the past two decades measuring the wrong things in public sector reform and must now shift focus to how citizens actually experience state institutions.

At the heart of the book is a simple argument: public service reforms continue to disappoint not because of a lack of policies or funding, but because they are rarely judged by the one measure that matters most to ordinary people — what it feels like to deal with the state.

The authors point to more than 20 years of public concern over the quality of service delivery in Ghana, noting that successive presidents have raised concerns, vice presidents have directed agencies to improve, heads of the civil service have criticised poor frontline attitudes, and service charters and digital platforms have been introduced.

Yet, they argue, many citizens in 2026 still face the same long queues, confusion and institutional indifference.

A central theme of the book is the distinction between Customer Experience in the private sector and what the authors describe as Citizen Experience in public service.

They argue that while a dissatisfied bank customer can move to another bank, a citizen cannot take a passport application, land registration, or other state service to a competing public office.

Because of that, public institutions cannot simply borrow private-sector tools and assumptions without adapting them to the realities of government service.

The authors say public institutions should be judged not mainly by commercial measures such as customer retention or standard satisfaction scores but by values such as dignity, equity, and trust.

They also argue that, unlike private businesses, public institutions cannot choose which “customers” to prioritise. Every citizen, they say, is entitled to the same standard of service regardless of status, income or influence.

The book identifies what it calls the Citizen Experience Failure Cycle — five self-reinforcing institutional patterns that the authors believe explain why many public sector reforms fail to improve the citizens’ actual experience.

According to the book, the cycle often begins with policy announcements that are not backed by the operational changes needed to deliver them. It cites, for example, a pledge to reduce land title registration from six months to 30 days without changing the processes, staffing, or systems that cause the delays.

It also points to what it describes as digitalisation without capability building — situations where new online portals are introduced, but staff are not properly trained to use them and continue processing applications manually.

The authors further criticise the publication of service standards that are never enforced, arguing that such promises can damage public trust more than making no promise at all. They also fault leadership systems that reward institutions for processing volume and compliance reports rather than for whether citizens’ problems are actually resolved.

The result, they argue, is reform fatigue among staff and growing cynicism among citizens who no longer believe repeated promises of change.

While the book acknowledges the importance of technology and systems reform, it argues that the real starting point for change is leadership.

Drawing on a comparison of two hospitals with similar budgets, staffing, and policy conditions, the authors argue that the difference in service quality often comes down to leadership choices and priorities rather than resources alone.

They say many senior leaders in public institutions are insulated from the daily experience of citizens because they do not directly encounter the long queues, broken processes, and poor frontline behaviour faced by ordinary people.

According to the book, leaders tend to get what they measure and reward. If institutions continue to reward compliance reports, activity levels, and processing volumes rather than waiting times, problem resolution, and citizen outcomes, service delivery is unlikely to improve in any meaningful way.

The authors also argue that when poor treatment of citizens goes unchallenged by senior officials, it sends a powerful message to staff that citizen experience is not a real priority.

As a way forward, the book proposes a “reset” centred on leadership accountability and measurable citizen outcomes.

Among the measures it recommends are regular leadership immersion in the real experience of public services, outcome-based performance metrics, visible modelling of expected service behaviour by leaders, and meaningful accountability for citizen experience performance.

The authors argue that leaders should not only rely on reports from subordinates, but should personally experience their institutions’ service channels, including queues, digital platforms and frontline interactions, in order to understand the reality citizens face.

They also call for a shift away from measuring institutional activity alone and towards indicators such as waiting times, first-attempt resolution and whether citizens’ problems are actually solved.

The book concludes with a strong case for a national measurement system to track how citizens experience public services across institutions.

It argues that Ghana currently lacks reliable, comparable citizen experience data across government, making it difficult to tell whether reforms are actually improving service delivery or simply being announced without measurable results.

To address this, the authors propose a publicly reported National Citizen Experience Dashboard, updated quarterly and broken down by institution.

They say such a system would give government, public servants and citizens a clearer picture of where service delivery is improving and where it continues to fail, while helping to move the conversation away from rhetoric and towards evidence.

The launch of the book is expected to contribute to ongoing national conversations about public sector reform, service delivery standards and the need to rebuild trust between citizens and state institutions.