Romanians in the diaspora and digitalisation: perceptions, needs and recommendations

Romania has one of the largest diasporas: communities of millions of citizens, concentrated in Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, but present on every continent. Estimates of the size of this community range from the official figures presented by the Romanian state (slightly over 1.2 million holders of a Romanian citizen's passport with residence abroad2) to broader assessments, which also include the historical communities, of up to 9.7 million. At European level, Romania leads in the number of citizens who are residents in another country of the Union, the figure reaching, according to Eurostat, 3.1 million.3

Whatever the reference figure, the order of magnitude places the relationship between the Romanian state and its citizens abroad among the major themes of public policy. For these communities, the digitalisation of public services is an administrative stake amplified by the distance separating them both from the institutions in Romania and from Romania's consulates abroad, the lack of digitalisation translating into the need to make a journey to Romania, or a trip to the consulate involving hours of driving or a flight.

This report presents the main findings of the opinion survey on the digitalisation of public services conducted by Edge Institute in the Romanian diaspora in July 2026, on a sample of 2,717 respondents (margin of error: ±2.4 percentage points), together with the public policy recommendations that follow from them. The comparisons with the population in Romania use the Edge Institute and AtlasIntel survey from June 2026.4

The undertaking is part of a broader research effort into Romanians' perceptions of digitalisation, launched in order to bring into the public policy-making process the measured opinion of citizens and the reality of their experience, precisely the resource that is systematically missing.

The report is structured in six thematic chapters, followed by a chapter of recommendations. Chapter 1 documents the concrete costs, in money, time and relationships, that the lack of digitalisation imposes on the diaspora.

Chapter 2 analyses attitudes towards digitalisation and the paradox of an enthusiastic population that makes little use of the existing tools.

Chapter 3 shows how the diaspora assesses the level and pace of Romania's digitalisation, by comparison with the countries of residence.

Chapter 4 details the services that Romanians abroad want available entirely online and sets them against international practices and the infrastructure already existing in Romania.

Chapter 5 addresses digital fears, barriers and skills, and chapter 6 places digitalisation in the broader context of the relationship of trust between the diaspora and the Romanian state, while chapter 7 formulates the public policy recommendations.

A diaspora administratively connected and the cost of the absence of digitalisation

The first myth the data dismantles is that of a diaspora “gone for good”, administratively disconnected from the Romanian state: 58% of Romanians in the diaspora needed, in the past 12 months, to resolve an administrative matter with Romanian institutions. Far from being a population that has burned its bureaucratic bridges with the country, the diaspora remains a constant (and often captive) client of the Romanian administration and, although the intensity of the interaction decreases with age, it remains a majority across all generations: 68% of people under 30 needed the services of the Romanian state in the past year, compared with 60% of those aged 30–46 and 54% of people born before 1980. The nature of the matters to be resolved confirms the hierarchy of needs that we will find throughout the report: 42% of those who interacted with Romanian institutions did so for a new passport or for the renewal of an existing one, 20% for birth, marriage or death certificates, 14% for the apostille of Romanian documents, 11% for the sale or purchase of a property, and 9% each for inheritances or for dealings with ANAF. A typical respondent had 1.6 such matters to resolve in the course of a single year.

Asked how they concretely resolved the administrative matter, only 7% of respondents were able to do so entirely remotely (online, by post or through someone else). Another 17% resolved it at the consulate in their country of residence, which, in the real geography of the diaspora, generally means a considerably greater amount of time than that allocated by most Romanians in the country for the same procedure.

The remaining almost two thirds of those who interacted with the state (that is, 38.5% of the total diaspora) had to make a trip to Romania: 45% specially for that matter, and 21% including the procedure in a holiday or a visit to family. At the time of the survey, 10% had still not managed to resolve their matter.

It is worth emphasising what “I resolved it at the consulate” actually means. Romania's consular network is undersized for communities of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people per country; for many Romanians, the nearest consulate is hundreds of kilometres away, and obtaining an appointment can take entire weeks. From the perspective of the cost in time, the trip to the consulate is not always a significantly cheaper alternative than the trip to the country, but merely another form of the same distance tax that the state levies on its citizens abroad.

The survey also measured the cost of these journeys. Among those who travelled to Romania specially for an administrative matter, only 3% spent under 200 EUR. One fifth (20%) spent between 200 and 500 EUR, 31% between 500 and 1,000 EUR, 21% between 1,000 and 2,000 EUR, and a quarter (25%) over 2,000 EUR, sums that include transport, accommodation and days taken off work. In practice, half of those who made the trip spent up to 1,000 EUR, and the other half exceeded this threshold; the share of those for whom the journey cost nothing is statistically negligible (0.2%).

On the basis of these data an order-of-magnitude estimate of the total cost can be constructed. With a reference diaspora of 4 million people (a particularly conservative figure, given that in the EU alone an estimated 3.1 million Romanians are counted), of whom 38.5% had to travel to Romania in the past year for an administrative matter, that is approximately 1.5 million people, and with a median expenditure of about 1,000 EUR per journey, the result is approximately 1.54 billion euros spent by Romanians in the diaspora in a single year to compensate, out of their own pocket, for the absence of digital public services.

The estimate is deliberately conservative: it does not take into account the fact that some Romanians travel several times a year for administrative matters, nor that almost half of the journeys cost over 1,000 EUR, nor the opportunity costs that are hard to monetise, with holidays spent in queues instead of rest, working days lost, stress, plans postponed, which indicates to us that the real bill is, almost certainly, higher.

The five-year perspective confirms the recurrence of the phenomenon: only 31% of Romanians in the diaspora have never needed to travel to Romania specially for an administrative matter. One in five (21%) made such a trip only once, almost a third (32%) two or three times, and 16% at least four times.

Where neither the trip to the country nor the consulate is within reach, the diaspora activates a third infrastructure: family and friends remaining in Romania. Asked how often they have to turn to someone in the country to resolve an administrative matter that they would resolve themselves online if this were possible, only 34% of respondents declared that they always resolve it themselves. 35% turn to someone once a year or more rarely, 25% a few times a year, and 6% at least once a month.

Among young people under 30, the share of those who turn to someone in the country “monthly or more often” is twice as high as in the rest of the sample (11%, compared with 5%). The explanation lies both in the greater intensity of administrative needs at the beginning of adult life, and in the availability of parents remaining in the country to function as “administrative couriers”.

At the same time, the data must also be read in the light of the 7% who declared that they resolved administrative tasks through someone else, by post or online, the particularly small percentage indicating (also) the fact that the usefulness of delegation is limited. One example of delegation is the renewal of the identity card, which cannot be carried out at consulates even at present (pending the preparation of the infrastructure for issuing the electronic identity card), but can be done remotely, through a special procedure that involves a power of attorney for someone in the country who can undertake the steps on behalf of the beneficiary. Nor does this procedure completely spare the beneficiary the trip to the consulate, this being necessary for the power of attorney and for the submission of the 5 specific photographs.

This transfer of burden has two additional implications. The first: the real cost of bureaucracy not translated into digital format is borne not only by the diaspora, but also by the population in the country, with pensioner parents standing in queues for their children who have left or siblings and friends who take time off work for certificates. The second: dependence on informal intermediaries creates inequity, and whoever no longer has anyone at home is left with the option of travelling, the most expensive variant.

A particular case with rising stakes is that of pensions. Approximately 5% of the diaspora is already made up of pensioners, and the number of those who give priority to the digitalisation of pension procedures and the aggregation of contributions without yet being pensioners is more than three and a half times higher. The diaspora that left en masse in the 2000s is advancing in age, and pension files with contribution periods in two or more states will become, in the next decade, one of the most frequent and most complex cross-border administrative procedures, and the public pension system must prepare from now for this wave, a preparation that means, above all, entirely electronic procedures.

The digital optimism of the diaspora

If in terms of costs the diaspora pays more than the population in the country, in terms of attitudes it offers the Romanian state a capital of trust that few public policies have at their disposal. 60% of Romanians in the diaspora consider digitalisation a very good thing, and another 20% a good thing, with a total of 80% in favour. Only 4% consider it a bad or very bad thing.

The comparison with the population in Romania is telling. In the country too the majority is favourable (41% “very good”, 34% “good”), but the intensity differs: the share of those choosing the superlative option is almost 20 percentage points higher in the diaspora, and explicit scepticism (“bad” or “very bad”) is almost three times more frequent in the country (11%) than in the diaspora (4%).

Favourability towards digitalisation is a majority position in the diaspora regardless of the level of education, with a gradual increase as formal education rises: 77% of those who completed at most eight grades consider digitalisation a good or very good thing, compared with 79% of upper-secondary graduates, 86% of university graduates and 91% of those with a master's or doctorate. In other words, support for digitalisation is not the preserve of an educated elite, but runs across the entire social structure of the diaspora.

It is worth recalling, for context, what Romanians understand by “the digitalisation of the state”. In the national survey of June 2026, the dominant definition is unequivocally functional: 78% of respondents include in digitalisation the possibility of submitting applications and resolving things exclusively online, without a counter, and 63% that citizens should no longer be free couriers for the institutions of the state, carrying documents from one to another. 52% mention, for example, documents carried in the phone and usable online. At the bottom of the list, with 19% and 6% respectively, are modern presentation websites for ministries and the social media pages of institutions, indicating that the public in the country — with a plausible presumption of direct applicability in the diaspora as well — sees digitalisation as an infrastructure for solving problems.

The majority of those living in the diaspora estimate their level of digital skill as high or very high (52%), 42% consider themselves at a medium level and only 6% at a low or very low level. From this point of view, the diaspora has a slightly more confident attitude than Romanians in the country, where the corresponding shares are 46% – 44% – 10%.

There is a strong correlation between the level of formal education and the respondent's readiness to declare high digital skills: 84% of master's or doctoral graduates in the diaspora consider that they possess high or very high technological abilities, compared with 69% of bachelor's graduates, 44% of upper-secondary graduates and 33% of those with at most eight grades. We will return to this self-assessment in Chapter 5, where we set it against the objective measurements of the European Commission, a comparison that puts the declarative optimism into perspective.

The same population that declares in a proportion of 80% that digitalisation is a good thing and in a proportion of 52% that it has high digital skills makes very little use of the existing Romanian digital tools. 61% of respondents did not use, in the past year, any of the means of online interaction tested, neither applications of the state, nor even the online banking applications of banks in Romania.

In first place among the tools used are, almost equally, Ghiseul.ro and a non-state route of interaction (the online account at a Romanian bank), both used by approximately 21–22% of Romanians in the diaspora. Far behind follow the qualified electronic signature (6%), the SPV account – the Virtual Private Space of ANAF (6%), the ROeID account with its associated application (5%) and the account in the HUB of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (5%). Young people under 30 fare somewhat better: among them, “only” 48% use no tool, but even among them use is not a majority.

Non-use cannot be explained by the absence of need — we saw in Chapter 1 that 58% had administrative matters to resolve — nor by the technophobia of the population, contradicted by the attitude data. The explanation must be sought in the low awareness of the existing tools, in their limited practical usefulness for someone thousands of kilometres from the counter, in the friction of enrolment (accounts that themselves require physical presence for activation or tools that presuppose already holding other tools). To exemplify: only 5.2% of Romanians have an account in the services HUB of the MAI or ROeID (which is another method of authentication in the HUB), while 14% of them have undertaken apostille procedures and 7% have requested a criminal record certificate, two of the services that the MAI offers online.

40% of respondents interacted with the digital services of the Romanian state in the past year. Among them, almost two thirds (61%) used online booking for obtaining an identity card or a passport. The online payment of taxes and duties was carried out by 35%, and a quarter obtained documents or papers online from the town hall, ANAF or other state institutions.

Satisfaction with these interactions is, at best, tempered. 38% of users declare themselves satisfied or very satisfied; 36% little or not at all satisfied; a quarter neither one nor the other. In practice, for every satisfied user there is a dissatisfied one. It is notable that dissatisfaction does not correlate visibly with any sociodemographic variable (age, gender, education) or with the service used, but appears to be a diffuse assessment of the general quality of digital interaction with the Romanian state.

The 60% who did not interact online with Romanian institutions were asked why. Almost half (47%) say simply: they had no need. The remaining reasons, however, form a picture of the institutional design: 29% state that institutions require compulsory physical presence at the counter, and 23% that they are asked for documents that the institutions of the state already have, a direct breach of the once-only principle enshrined in national and European legislation and a symptom of the lack of interoperability. To these are added problems relating to user experience, where the online process is described as “too cumbersome” (19%) and websites or applications that do not work or are hard to read (17%).

Asked how they would prefer to interact with Romanian institutions if they could choose, Romanians in the diaspora answer unequivocally: 87% would choose the online option for obtaining documents from the town hall, taxes and duties or other institutions, and likewise 87% for booking an appointment at a state hospital. The preference for online is even higher for the purchase of private services (plane tickets, insurance, hotels, utilities, at 93%), but falls for general shopping (42%), a sign that respondents distinguish between the types of interaction and consciously choose the online administration.

Romania seen from across the borders: little digitalisation and slow

The assessment that the diaspora makes of the digital status quo is severe, with only 10% of diaspora members considering that Romania is very or fairly digitalised. 27% see it as partially digitalised, and an absolute majority (53%) little or not at all digitalised. The distribution is close to that measured in the country (9% – 41% – 48%), with one significant nuance: in the diaspora, the hard negative pole (“not at all digitalised”) and uncertainty (“don't know”) are more populated, while the middle assessment (“partially digitalised”) is visibly thinner.

In the assessment of the pace, 75% of Romanians in the diaspora consider that the digitalisation of state institutions is taking place slowly or very slowly; only 5% perceive a fast or very fast pace, and 7% consider it adequate (“just as it should be”). In Romania, dissatisfaction with the pace is even slightly higher (82% slow or very slow), the difference stemming mainly from the higher share of “don't know” answers in the diaspora, natural for a population that does not interact daily with the institutions in the country.

What distinguishes the diaspora from the public in the country is the existence of a term of comparison: 70% consider that the administration in their country of residence is far more digitalised than Romania, and another 14% – somewhat more digitalised. Only 11% see the two systems at the same level, and 5.5% consider Romania more digitalised than the country in which they live.

This comparative experience explains why the diaspora can play a distinct role in the administrative modernisation of Romania, occupying the place of a carrier of standards.

What Romanians in the diaspora want, concretely: passports, identity documents, civil status

Asked which services of the Romanian state should be available 100% online for citizens in the diaspora, as a priority, respondents constructed a hierarchy: the passport and identity documents are mentioned by 75%, almost three times more than the next option. In second place is voting from abroad (26%), followed by civil status certificates (23%), the registration of children born abroad (22%), procedures relating to pensions and the aggregation of contributions (21%), the criminal record certificate (20%), the apostille (19%), the sale and purchase of property (14%), tax declarations and interactions with ANAF (14%) and the inheritance/partition procedure (11%). On average, each respondent selected 2.4 priorities.

The hierarchy of wishes faithfully reflects the hierarchy of real needs, measured in Chapter 1: the passport dominates both the list of matters actually resolved in the past year (42% of interactions), and the list of digital services used (61% of users used online booking for identity documents). The consular data confirms that travel documents and identity documents are, year after year, the most provided services of the Romanian consular network.

The desire for digitalisation can have several meanings. The first of them: obtaining documents entirely online, an aspect of a more sensitive character including in the light of European regulations. Although countries outside the EU, such as the United Kingdom and, recently, Canada, allow the renewal of passports online, questions arise relating to biometric data, which cannot be stored for more than 90 days. Renewal would rest precisely on those data already being held, the idea being to eliminate the journey because the information is already available and can be used on request for a new identity document, combined with methods of validating the photograph.

Specific cases of online renewal could be: for children under 12, who are exempt from the taking of fingerprints, or in the case of simple temporary passports for which fingerprints are not taken.

Any such procedure should be based on identification and authentication carried out at a high level of assurance, precisely what the EUDI wallet would allow. We can consider a case in which the parent requests, using the attributes in the wallet (their personal data and data from the child's birth certificate) a passport for the minor child, an aspect that deserves to be analysed in detail in subsequent analyses.

The second potential meaning: their availability online to be presented in a format accepted by public institutions and private actors is likewise linked to the EUDI wallet, the instrument that would allow us to no longer carry the identity card or the passport with us but, when travelling by plane for example, to make it possible to present the documents directly from the phone at the airport.

A telling result of the survey is that Romanians mention among the digitalisation priorities services that already exist in electronic format as well. The criminal record certificate, requested online by 20% of respondents, has been obtainable online since 2023, free of charge, through the ghiseul.ro and hub.mai.gov.ro platforms, including from abroad.

This discrepancy between the existence of the service and the perception of the public may indicate two things, which are not mutually exclusive. The first: insufficient promotion of the existing tools, where the state builds digital services but does not communicate them systematically to the public that would benefit most from them. The second, more uncomfortable: a limited practical usefulness of the digital version, because institutions (including Romanian ones) continue to ask for the physical version of the document, an aspect documented through the experience of candidates undertaking specific procedures for obtaining a driving licence.9

The apostille, which is also among the top digitalisation demands (19%), has been obtainable electronically through the MAI services HUB since October 2023 for official documents issued in electronic format. For those issued on paper, the procedure continues to be carried out in physical format.10

On the matter of civil status, the demand of the diaspora (23% for certificates, 22% for the registration of children born abroad) meets an infrastructure recently built and insufficiently used or known: the Integrated Information System for Issuing Civil Status Documents (SIIEASC). The system, operational in all administrative-territorial units since 31 March 2025 and extended to all diplomatic missions and consular offices of Romania since 25 September 2025, allows the issuing of birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates in digital format (as well).11

Thus, the assessment after one year of activity showed a low appetite for issuing civil status documents in digital format (although specific data on the diaspora was not communicated), an aspect that can likewise be explained by insufficient promotion and by the limited usefulness of the service.

“From the moment of the initiation of the first flow developed through SIIEASC in the information system and up to the present, the following activities have been recorded:

1,018,393 civil status events registered – of which 250,202 “birth”, 407,730 “death” and 360,461 “marriage”;

797,088 birth certificates issued – of which 763,241 in physical format on a secure form, and 33,847 in digital format;

235,737 marriage certificates issued – of which 225,633 in physical format on a secure form, and 10,104 in digital format;

485,824 death certificates issued – of which 483,071 in physical format on a secure form, and 2,753 in digital format;

As regards the civil status documents stored in the electronic archive, we specify that 2,926,784 civil status documents were validated, of which 2,083,926 birth records, 613,408 marriage records and 229,450 death records.”

DGEP — “1 year since the operationalisation of SIIEASC at national level” (2026)

This is, at the same time, a foundation on which one can build quickly. The step that would turn the investment into a benefit felt by the diaspora is for the electronic civil status certificate to become the default working document in all interactions with the Romanian state (including consular ones), and for the transcription of civil status documents issued abroad, in particular the registration of children born outside the country, especially in EU member states, to be able to be initiated and completed entirely online, with the verification of foreign documents through the channels of European administrative cooperation.12

The current digital interface between the diaspora and consular services is the econsulat.ro platform, which allows booking an appointment at the consulate, pre-uploading documents and their preliminary validation, as well as tracking the status of the application. Its architecture says everything about the current limit of consular digitalisation: eConsulat (only) books and validates. With very few exceptions, no procedure can be completed fully electronically and at the end of every flow there is still the physical journey to the consular counter.

The survey data shows exactly the same thing from the users' side: the main “digital interaction” reported by the diaspora is online booking for an identity card or passport (61% of users of digital services). It is significant that, asked what they want from digitalisation, Romanians in the country too place online bookings (at the hospital, at institutions) at the top of the priorities: the AtlasIntel survey from June places online booking at the hospital and the medical file accessible online in first place (53%), and obtaining personal documents online among the top five options.13 Online booking is, therefore, everywhere, the first step of digitalisation, but it should be only the first step.

In second place in the hierarchy of the diaspora's demands, far behind documents but ahead of all the other services, is voting from abroad, mentioned by 26% of respondents as a digitalisation priority. The demand is not surprising for a population that has experienced, electoral cycle after electoral cycle, the queues at the polling stations abroad and for whom the distance to the nearest polling station is measured, as in the case of consulates, in entire hours on the road. What is interesting is that the demand for online voting is not significantly lower in the country either: 28% of the respondents of the national survey place it among the top three digitalisation priorities.14

Voting over the internet is a more sensitive matter, which at the same time currently benefits from a solid infrastructure (the Information system for monitoring turnout and preventing illegal voting and the Information system for centralising the tally sheets) that could be an important point of departure in seriously getting the project under way, with an independent security assessment, an adopted legal framework, the piloting of voting sessions of a consultative character (such as participatory budgeting for the diaspora) and a public audit of every stage.

Fears, barriers and digital skills

The massive support for digitalisation and the use of new technologies also comes with fears: asked what these are, Romanians in the diaspora constructed a hierarchy: the main concern is access to personal data without the citizens' consent, indicated by 54% of respondents. In second place are the doubts that artificial intelligence tools produce as to what is true and what is false (35%). Other themes tested were indicated by 15–24% of respondents: dependence on social networks (24%), division in society and the weakening of the bonds between people (21%), the replacement of many jobs by artificial intelligence (20%) and the impossibility of controlling children's and young people's access to sensitive content (16%). On average, each respondent indicated 1.9 fears; only 15% consider that these risks are non-existent.

The comparison with the population in the country nuances the portrait. The fear regarding personal data is equally intense in both samples (54% in the diaspora, 52% in the country). By contrast, the diaspora is visibly less worried than the country about dependence on social networks (24% compared with 46%), about children's access to sensitive content (16% compared with 31%) and about the real/AI confusion (35% compared with 45%). In parallel, the share of those who see no risk is double in the diaspora (15%, compared with 8% in the country).

Chapter 2 showed a confident self-assessment, with 52% of Romanians in the diaspora declaring high or very high digital skills, and 46% in the country. This declarative confidence must, however, be set against the objective measurements of the European Commission: according to Eurostat data for 2025, only 31.8% of Romanians aged between 16 and 74 have at least basic digital skills, last place in the European Union, far behind the European average of about 60%, and slightly over 11% have digital skills above the basic level. Romania is, simultaneously, in second place in the EU in the use of social networks (85.4% of internet users) and in last place in elementary digital operations such as communication by e-mail (49.3%) or the use of internet banking (33.3%).

The figures indicate a gap between perception and measurement, although, in order to access well-designed digital public services a high level of skills is not needed, the proof being precisely the omnipresence of social networks, used massively (also) because they are easy to use.

Trust, belonging and the potential for return

Digitalisation sits against the background of a fragile relationship of trust between the diaspora and the Romanian state. Only 22% of Romanians abroad believe that Romania is heading in a good direction, while 49% believe it is heading in the wrong direction. The same respondents, asked about the country in which they live, answer almost as a mirror image: 49% see their country of residence heading in a good direction and only 28% in a wrong one. The distance between the two assessments (27 percentage points at the positive pole) is the measure of the trust gap that Romania has to make up.

A few demographic nuances are worth retaining. Men are significantly more inclined than women to consider that Romania is heading in the wrong direction (56% compared with 42%). Young people under 30 are somewhat more optimistic than the rest of the diaspora (27% see a good direction, compared with 22% in the other generations), and optimism rises slightly with education: 26% of master's or doctoral graduates see a good direction, compared with 16–17% of graduates of vocational schools or of at most eight grades. On the other side, the perception that the country of residence is heading in a good direction is particularly widespread among people with low education (60% of those with a maximum of eight grades).

The radiography of dissatisfaction is completed by the question about change: 70% of Romanians in the diaspora consider that Romania needs major changes, 26% believe that some things must be changed and others kept, and only 4% consider that things are, in general, good. On the list of concerns relating to Romania, corruption in state institutions dominates by far (86%), followed by the public health system (52%), the education system (45%) and prices (42%); one in five respondents (21%) explicitly mentions the relationship of the Romanian state with the citizens in the diaspora among the greatest concerns.

Mistrust has direct and measurable economic consequences. Asked whether they intend to invest in Romania in the next three years, only 4% of respondents have concrete plans, and another 5% would like to but do not know how or where, an interesting signal for policies of attracting the diaspora's capital, which shows that there is unstructured demand for investment instruments accessible from a distance. 37% have a cautious attitude, conditional on developments in the country. The absolute majority (54%) is, however, certain that it will not invest, and this certainty rises abruptly with age: from 38% among young people aged 18–29, to 51% among adults aged 30–46, 58% in the generation aged 47–58 and 67% among people aged 59 and over, which indicates, therefore, that every decade of waiting means the definitive loss of entire cohorts of potential investors.

The plans to return tell the same story, with 53% of respondents declaring that they had no intention of returning anyway and 33% who have become, in the past year, less motivated to do so. Only 10% maintain their plan to return, and 4% have become more motivated.

It would, however, be an error of interpretation to read these figures as a definitive parting. The analysis of concrete ties with Romania divides the diaspora into two groups with distinctly different profiles. A group of approximately 30% does not send money to relatives in the country nor intends to invest: median age 42–43, majority female (59%). The other 70% maintain active ties with Romania: they send money (54% of the total send occasionally or monthly), own property (43%) or active bank accounts (26%), make their investments conditional on the country's development. This group (a majority in the diasporas in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States) is younger, with a median age about 3 years lower than that of the first group, majority male (55%); most have travelled to the country at least twice in the past five years for administrative matters.

Digitalisation means respect and transparency, and for a population that today perceives Romania in decline and its country of residence on the rise, every simplified administrative procedure is an important step in rebuilding trust.

The link between digitalisation and trust is not yet evident to the general public: in the national survey, asked what the benefits of digitalisation are, Romanians indicated massively the gain in time (66%) and the reduction of bureaucracy (62%), but only 11% spontaneously mentioned an increase in the population's trust in state institutions.15 People do not, therefore, ask for digitalisation in order to trust the state; but a state that respects their time is the only kind of state in which trust can begin to grow again.

The potential of new technologies for the relationship with the diaspora is not, however, limited to administrative procedures. Three directions remain poorly explored by the Romanian state:

• Information

  A single digital channel, in Romanian, with information conveyed in simple language, verified, about rights, obligations and Romanian procedures, as well as relevant European ones (the aggregation of pensions, the recognition of qualifications, the rights of mobile workers) would reduce the diaspora's dependence on informal Facebook groups and on commercial intermediaries who monetise the confusion.

• Support for people in need

  Victims of labour exploitation, isolated elderly people, Romanians in emergency situations abroad can be supported through dedicated digital services, through video assistance lines in Romanian, online reporting of situations of abuse, connection with local social services, especially where the physical consulate is hundreds of kilometres away.

• A sense of belonging

  from digital access to education in Romanian for children born abroad, to civic participation from a distance, with public consultations open to the diaspora.

Public policy recommendations

• 01

  Identity documents and passports. Prioritising the offer of the possibility of requesting electronic identity cards (including with residence abroad) directly from the consulate. Priority promotion of the EUDI wallet among the diaspora population. Thorough analysis of the possibility of requesting passports entirely online for certain categories (children under 12, temporary passports).

• 02

  Completing civil status procedures entirely online, capitalising on the investment already made in SIIEASC: the issuing of certificates in electronic form by default (with a physical version only on request), the online transcription/registration of the documents of children born abroad, with the administrative verification of foreign documents between authorities – not through the repeated trips of parents to the consulate.

• 03

  Transforming eConsulat from a booking platform into a processing platform: every consular service should have a fully electronic flow (submission, payment, processing, delivery), with physical presence reduced to the strict biometric necessity and to complex cases, with the publication of progress indicators (such as the share of consular procedures completable 100% online and adoption among Romanians).

• 04

  The cross-border electronic pension file: the online submission and tracking of pension files and of the aggregation of contributions, with electronic data exchange with the pension houses in the states of residence through the European EESSI system.

• 01

  The priority launch of the European Digital Identity Wallet (RoEUDIW) with the diaspora as an explicit target public, precisely because the wallet responds directly to Romanians' fear no. 1 (access to data without consent – 54%), and the systematic enrolment of the diaspora in digital identity (CEI, ROeID, then RoEUDIW): every consular interaction should include, as a matter of course, the activation of electronic identity; potential measurable objective: the majority of administratively active diaspora citizens enrolled by the end of 2028. Electronic identity is the key without which any online service remains inaccessible from a distance.

• 02

  The effective application of the “once-only” principle: the real operationalisation of interoperability in order to eliminate the practice of asking the citizen for documents issued by other institutions of the Romanian state (23% of non-users in the diaspora invoke exactly this barrier).

How fears are answered: safety by design

Two directions follow directly from the data:

• 01

  For the dominant fear (access to personal data without consent), the structural answer is the promotion of the instruments with the strongest guarantees of data protection by design, first of all the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet / RoEUDIW), which Romania is obliged to make available to citizens pursuant to the eIDAS 2.0 Regulation. The wallet overturns the current logic of data exchange: the citizen holds the documents in their own phone, decides case by case which attribute to disclose (for example, only the confirmation of majority, not the entire identity card), and every access by an institution is visible and auditable. For the diaspora, the wallet has an additional value: it works identically across borders, in any member state, exactly where the approximately 3.1 million Romanian women and men live.

• 02

  For the second fear (the confusion between the real and that generated with AI), the only lasting antidote is the development of critical digital skills: the capacity to verify sources, to recognise synthetic content, to use AI tools knowingly. It is not by chance that the AI fear is lower precisely in the diaspora, more exposed to mature digital ecosystems and to the public discussion about AI in the countries of residence. Digital literacy is not only an economic policy (employability), but also one of information security in an age of disinformation.16

At the same time, the national digital skills programmes almost completely ignore a public of millions of citizens: the diaspora, for which specific measures are necessary:

• 03

  Consulates as support hubs for digital services. Every consular mission can host a digital assistance point (physical and by videoconference) where citizens are helped to create and activate their electronic identity, to use the public platforms and to complete procedures online. Every classic consular interaction should systematically include enrolment in digital identity, especially from the moment of the implementation of the European wallet, in order to increase the chances that the next interaction is carried out electronically, an aspect conditional, of course, also on the availability of electronic public services.

• 04

  Digital literacy sessions in communities, organised together with diaspora associations, churches, Romanian weekend schools and the Romanian business community abroad, with an emphasis on the transactional aspect (electronic identity, signature, payments, public services).17

• 05

  Step-by-step guides in simple language, on real life events of the diaspora (“my passport has expired”, “a child was born to me abroad”, “I want to submit my pension file”), published centrally and promoted on the channels actually used by the diaspora, such as social networks.

• 01

  A permanent campaign of awareness of the existing digital services, delivered on the real channels of the diaspora (social networks, associations, the press of the Romanian communities) and the constant promotion of the digital alternative at the moment these services are requested in physical format.

• 02

  The annual measurement of the diaspora's digital experience, through a public barometer with stable indicators (the share of procedures completable online, the number of journeys avoided, user satisfaction, the average cost of an administrative procedure from abroad) and the systematic consultation of the diaspora in the design of services, using their direct experience of the mature digital administrations in the countries of residence.