Digitizing Public Services at IPGUL

Problem

IPGUL — Luanda’s urban planning and management institute — ran a number of public-facing processes on manual, paper-heavy workflows. Requests piled up, handoffs between departments were slow, and there was no consistent way to track a process from request to resolution.

My role

I joined as a backend developer focused on the digitalization effort: analyzing existing workflows, identifying where automation would actually remove friction (rather than just digitizing the paperwork as-is), and building the APIs and services that power the new digital processes.

How I approached it

The first step was understanding the process as it actually happened, not as it was documented — talking to the people running it day to day to find where requests stalled. From there, I designed REST APIs and backend services in Node.js and TypeScript, backed by a relational database, to replace the manual handoffs with a system that tracks state automatically.

What’s shipping

Public-service workflows that used to depend on manual follow-up now move through a system that tracks status and routes requests automatically — ongoing work as more processes get migrated.

What I’m learning

Working inside a public institution means change happens carefully — every process change affects real people’s day-to-day work, so rollout has to be gradual and well communicated. It’s taught me to weigh technical elegance against what a team can actually adopt without disruption.