Enabling Environment: Tell Your Story - Engaging Citizens in Shaping Regional Digital Public Infrastructure
IEEE SSIT Sustainabiility Technical Committee
Session 227
Become an Ambassador for DPI in your community
Digital Public Infrastructure is built by governments but only works when citizens understand it, advocate for it, and hold it accountable. Most DPI sessions address the builders. This one addresses the ambassadors — the practitioners who translate DPI into local reality.
The GovTech Women's Challenge, sponsored by GIZ and hosted through GovStack Global, has built exactly this kind of practitioner community. Now in its third cohort, the program has produced over 650 women leaders across government, civil society, and the private sector who are actively deploying and championing DPI in their countries. This session draws from that community to demonstrate a replicable methodology: Tell Your Story.
The Session in Practice
Mei Lin Fung is Vice Chair of the UN AI for Good Impact Steering Committee and Chair of the IEEE SSIT Sustainability Technical Committee, she will lead the Tell Your Story Process for participants that harnesses AI to support citizen engagement in shaping Digital Public Infrastructure that increases opportunity for all.
Puja Raghaven organized the last two GovTech Women's Challenge cohorts for GIZ and continues as Lead Ambassador for the network. She brings direct experience designing the leadership architecture that turns individual participants into a sustained global practitioner community. She will walk through what made the cohort model work — and what Tell Your Story adds as a civic activation layer.
Nicole Green participated in the GovTech Women's Challenge and has since been to Singapore, New York, and Geneva to speak on its impact. She is now actively shaping DPI adoption in Trinidad and Tobago and advising peer countries across the Caribbean — small island states with distinct connectivity constraints, jurisdictional complexity, and strong motivation to leapfrog legacy infrastructure. She will demonstrate Tell Your Story live, showing how a practitioner becomes an ambassador capable of moving governments and communities.
Together, they anchor a session format piloted with over 300 students across India in April 2026: participants each develop a three-lens narrative — historical context, present-day application, future possibility — and leave with a personal story they can use immediately.
Successful Projects: The GovTech Women's Challenge has produced national-level DPI champions across Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. The Tell Your Story methodology, developed through the DH50 initiative under IEEE SSIT, provides the structured format for converting that network into a visible ambassador corps.
The next phase of WSIS implementation requires civic voice, not just technical capacity. This session offers a tested model: recruit from existing practitioner communities, give them a story structure, connect them regionally, and activate them as advocates. The 650-strong GovTech Women's network is proof the pipeline exists. Tell Your Story is the mechanism to deploy it.
The goal is to equip you to shape the digital public infrastructure that future generations will thank you for.
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C1. The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development
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C4. Capacity building
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C6. Enabling environment
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C7. ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-government
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C8. Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content
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C11. International and regional cooperation
C1 — Role of governments and all stakeholders in promotion of ICTs for development: This session directly models multi-stakeholder DPI advocacy, showing how practitioners from civil society and government work alongside each other to advance digital infrastructure adoption at national and regional levels.
C4 — Capacity building: The Tell Your Story methodology is a structured capacity-building tool. Participants leave with a personal narrative framework they can deploy immediately in their own communities and institutions. The GovTech Women's Challenge, with 650+ alumni, is a demonstrated capacity-building pipeline.
C6 — Enabling environment: The session addresses the human-side of enabling environments — not just policy and regulation, but the citizen advocates who create political and social conditions for DPI to take hold.
C7 — E-government: Both speakers are actively shaping e-government implementation — Puja through GovStack's global cohort architecture, Nicole through national and Caribbean-regional DPI adoption.
C8 — Cultural diversity and local content: Tell Your Story requires participants to ground DPI in their own cultural and community context. The methodology explicitly resists one-size-fits-all framing.
C11 — International and regional cooperation: The GovTech Women's network spans Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. This session models South-South and cross-regional practitioner cooperation in action.
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Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
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Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
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Goal 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all
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Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
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Goal 16: Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies
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Goal 17: Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development
This session advances the SDG agenda by building the human infrastructure that makes DPI work: citizen advocates who understand, promote, and hold accountable the digital systems shaping their communities. The GovTech Women's Challenge — 650+ women across Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean — directly addresses Goals 4, 5, and 10 by equipping underrepresented practitioners with leadership skills and civic voice. Tell Your Story translates that capacity into local DPI adoption, connecting bottom-up advocacy with national digital transformation agendas. The Caribbean focus addresses small island developing states specifically, where DPI can leapfrog legacy infrastructure gaps and directly support resilience goals.
- Objective 1: Close all digital divides and accelerate progress across the Sustainable Development Goals
- Objective 2: Expand inclusion in and benefits from the digital economy for all
- Objective 3: Foster an inclusive, open, safe and secure digital space that respects, protects and promotes human rights
IEEE SSIT Sustainability Technical Committee: ieee-ssit.org
GovStack Global: govstack.global
GovTech Women's Challenge (GIZ): govtechwomen.com
Nehitek Foundation: nehitek.org
LINKEDIN. @MeiLinFung