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 a practitioner community. Over the past years, 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 has stepped up to the role of IEEE DH50 Lead Ambassador for the network. She has been instrumental in developing 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 Greene is a communications strategist in GovTech from Trinidad and Tobago, with a Computer Science background from Trinity College (Hartford, CT). She works at the intersection of technology and communications, translating technical expertise and amplifying underrepresented voices. An active member of the GovStack Women in GovTech community, Nicole is a passionate advocate for women in tech and a mother of three.
Together, they anchor a session TWLL YOUR STORY piloted with over 300 students across India in April 2026: participants consider the physical and digital infrastructure that made their story possible — 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 Society for the Social Implications of Technology, provides the structured format for converting that network into a visible ambassador corps for a better future.
The next phase of WSIS implementation requires civic voice, not just technical capacity. This session offers a network for people who want to make a different in the digital future of their communities. Tell Your Story is the first step to take.
The goal is to equip you to shape the digital public infrastructure that future generations will thank you for.
Mei Lin Fung is Vice Chair of the UN AI for Good Impact Steering Committee and Co-founder of the Nehitek Foundation, working at the intersection of AI governance, digital public infrastructure, and MSME financing. In 2023 she co-chaired the expert roundtable spanning Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for the UN Commission on the Status of Women's first Digital Innovation Report — bringing together women's voices from four regions to shape the UN's understanding of digital innovation and inclusion.
A pioneer of CRM at Oracle and Co-founder of the People-Centered Internet with Vint Cerf, she has spent decades building platforms for communities whose stories are typically left out of policy design — from the Native American Tribal Resource Center to Puerto Rico's post-hurricane digital recovery plan. She developed the "Tell Your Story" workshop format, piloted with engineering students in India in 2025, as a way to help technical communities surface and communicate their own narratives. She currently chairs the IEEE SSIT Sustainability Committee and continues to bridge grassroots voice with global governance.
Nicole Greene is a communications strategist working in GovTech and a passionate advocate for women in tech, from Trinidad and Tobago. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Trinity College (Hartford, CT), and began her career in technology during the Y2K era. Nicole has worked across both technology and corporate communications, and describes her most valuable contribution as working in the space between the two — serving as translator and amplifier for technical expertise and for voices that might otherwise go unheard. She is an active member of the GovStack Women in GovTech community and a mother of three.
Puja Raghavan is an Indian lawyer and public policy professional based in Berlin, and a lead IEEE DH50 Ambassador for the GovTech Women’s Challenge. Her path into digital public infrastructure began not with technology but with watching how public systems in India often failed to reach the people they were meant to serve. That question — who gets left behind — carried her through law, political science, and public policy into GovStack at GIZ. There, her legal background became an asset: asking whether systems were trustworthy and accessible. Through the Women in GovTech Challenge, she has built a global community of women reshaping how technology serves people.
-
C1. The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development
-
C4. Capacity building
-
C6. Enabling environment
-
C7. ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-government
-
C8. Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content
-
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.
-
Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
-
Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
-
Goal 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all
-
Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
-
Goal 16: Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies
-
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
