BDT Director's Corner: Speeches

"GovTech ecosystems: an approach to driving impact-oriented digital transformation"

Esteemed Minister Maksut Shadayev,
Excellencies,
Colleagues,
Distinguished Guests and Participants,

It gives me immense pleasure to attend this important forum, and to address you. Allow me to thank the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation for organizing this meeting to discuss the importance of digital sovereignty as the basis for long-term international cooperation. Taking this opportunity, I would like to thank the Russian Federation for your generosity in hosting the ITU Regional Office for the CIS Region.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The centrepiece of international cooperation are the people we serve. And yet, as we speak, one third of the world’s population remain offline. Being offline means being left behind in every aspect of life. For those online, other concerns prevail, including cyber-threats and matters related to digital sovereignty.

Those online keep asking:

• Is it secure for me to go online?
• Is my privacy protected?
• What happens to my personal data which is harvested for profit and trends analysis without my knowledge or consent?

These are pertinent concerns that we need to address through regulatory, legal, and policy interventions.

Having said that, we must acknowledge that we now live in the data economy. ITU estimates show that global Internet traffic reached 5291 exabytes in 2022, more than twice the traffic of 2019. To put things in perspective, that is about a 1000 gigabytes per Internet user. This points to the growing data economy.

My focus today, is to talk about how our work in the Telecommunication Development Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union, is impacting people everywhere and leading them to a better life. In that regard, I would like to say that our priority is to close the digital divide, narrow the digital skills gap and accelerate sustainable digital transformation to enable social well-being, economic prosperity, and sustainable development in a secure environment. Key to our efforts is the role of GovTech ecosystems for human-centric impact oriented digital transformation.

We have achieved profound impact working and supporting governments in building digital ecosystems to serve as an engine to drive digital transformation. Recognizing that digitalization of public infrastructure can enhance public service delivery and make government services more easily accessible to citizens, we have recently launched numerous initiatives, that your governments can benefit from. To name but a few:

• One of them is GovStack – an expert community-driven multistakeholder initiative aimed at building a government technology stack that is constituted as a set of reusable building blocks for digitalizing any service.
• Another one is Open-Source Ecosystem Enablement – a recently launched project that accelerates the development and adoption of open-source software and data that can be used on digital public infrastructure.
• Other important ways through which we influence the global digital ecosystem are through our ITU Study and Focus Groups, through which we produce practical recommendations on standards and specifications that can guide national regulatory policies.

Let me elaborate on some of our initiatives:

1. Through our GovStack Women in GovTech Challenge, we have trained 139 women mentors from 59 digital government teams in digital leadership, team management, and digital service design and delivery using technical specifications. I invite you to stay tuned for these trainings, and to join our Global Community of GovTech Experts around the world.
2. Another example of our impact on the GovTech Global Ecosystem is the GovStack SandBox. This is an open demonstration environment for developers in government digital teams, startups, and systems integrators to learn about and evaluate the Building Block approach. Current use case demonstrations are for Unconditional Cash Transfer Programs and Construction Permits. Four building blocks are ready to be re-used for Identity, Payments and Consent, and Information Mediator. I would like to invite the GovTech Stakeholders in this event to try these and start creating your own use cases.
3. Our regional approach to country engagement is through the sharing of good practices and promoting the reusability of different digital public goods to accelerate government services according to country needs. Kazakhstan, which has 40 active online services based on open technologies, and 1,200 different public services available online, is leading this Regional Cooperation.