With its Claim for Global Digitalization Leadership, Ukraine has More to Offer the World than Source Code and Developer Talent

It has been a busy start to the year for Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation, the department primarily responsible for the country's digitalization. While most offices around the world took a couple of weeks to dust off the New Year's cobwebs, Ukraine started January by celebrating five years of Diia.education (a platform for reskilling and digital literacy), announcing a Global GovTech Board in Davos, and launching its 2030 WINWIN innovation strategy. 

The strategy represents a roadmap to - in the words of Deputy Minister for Digital Transformation Valeriya Ionan - "enable Ukraine to achieve an economic leap... (and position) the country as a regional leader and driver of innovation within the European Union." Eighteen strategic goals are defined across 14 sectors, each supported by a separate strategic document and accompanying center of excellence. 

Those familiar with Ukraine's digital transformation in recent years wouldn't bet against them. In 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised to transform Ukraine into a "digital state in a smartphone," simplifying the country's administration and increasing government transparency. 

Recent years have seen a string of successes:

• the first country in the world to register a digital ID as a legal document;
• one of the first to implement a digital COVID-19 certificate;
• and most recently, becoming the only non-EU member state involved in trialing all six of the EU's Digital Identity Wallet initiatives. 

Most celebrated has been the Diia app. An all-in-one digital portal, the app's release in 2020 suddenly allowed Ukrainians to interact with the government on everything from pension applications to unemployment benefits claims - all from the comfort of their homes. After the full-scale invasion, the government used citizens' collective intelligence on Diia to monitor the movements of Russian forces, record damage to buildings, and register those who had been internally displaced in the country. 

At this stage, the WINWIN strategy's ambitions for GovTech, one of its 14 strategic sectors, remain high-level. But the strategy promises "to actively promote Ukrainian GovTech solutions and expertise for foreign countries" and "export successful GovTech solutions as a source of soft power by strengthening Ukraine's technological brand and attracting employees to Ukrainian missions abroad." 

There certainly are avenues to do so. The launch of a new Center of Excellence will coincide with a World Economic Forum-backed Global GovTech Centre to train public sector leaders, and pilot new technologies. A related GovTech Board, developed in collaboration with the German government, will offer events and working groups for global digital transformation leaders. A GovTech Alliance - uniting Ukrainian IT companies, the government, and international partners - will drive state digitalization and export Ukrainian digital solutions globally. 

And when it comes to thinking about what other countries can learn from Ukraine, there is some precedent. The source code for Diia is already available online, and international partners have pledged $650,000 to kickstart the spread of Diia-like systems around the world. 

But it is oft-cited that the hardest part of digital government is the government bit, not the digital. Here, Ukraine has much to export beyond technology itself, and other countries might look to Ukraine for leadership in three ways. 

• The first is sharing a roadmap for using digitalization to combat corruption. Diia is the most discussed Ukrainian digital government product, but it is not the only one. Ukraine has also pioneered open-data registries and transparent public procurement platforms. 

Most successful among these has been the Prozorro platform, which makes public tenders in the country publicly accessible. In 2023, the most recent year on record, 72% of all government spending came from procedures in the Prozorro system, saving UAH 42 billion across 270,000 contracts. 

With estimates from the UN and IMF suggesting that anywhere from 10-25% of the value of government contracts globally are lost to corruption, the effects of exporting Ukraine's ecosystem of transparent procurement could be far-reaching. 

• Secondly, Ukraine offers a model of digital government during a time of crisis. "When Russia invaded," writes Turp-Balazs in a piece about making states digital fortresses, "millions relied on Diia to obtain documentation, apply for humanitarian assistance, and receive official notifications," even as physical administrative offices were threatened or destroyed. 

Ukraine's data storage today exists across over 100 dispersed government registries, making it much less vulnerable to attacks than international equivalents. The team behind Prozorro worked with AWS to transfer its data to a digital cloud outside of the country within weeks of the invasion, removing any susceptibility to physical infrastructure attacks. 

Ukraine also has years of experience repelling cyberattacks. As EU countries and NATO members ramp up spending on defense and resilience, there is no better country to support them with their digitalization than Ukraine. 

• Finally, overarching above both the anti-corruption efforts and the strength of Ukraine's digital government resilience is a more fundamental success, the government's ability to call on its population to support its digital efforts. Some of this is evidenced by the mere existence of platforms like Prozorro, premised on the idea that citizens can examine the tenders on the platform. 

But often, this support is even more explicit. Following the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian government relied on 300,000 volunteers to bolster cybersecurity, detect and mitigate propaganda, and coordinate humanitarian logistics.  

As just one example, the Ministry of Digital Transformation launched the "eVorog" chatbot on telegram in March 2022, which allowed citizens to provide real-time intelligence on the movement and makeup of Russian forces. By December of the same year, it had received more than 450,000 reports. 

As it looks ahead to 2030, Ukraine has all the tools to export another "Smart Nation" in the mold of Singapore, or an "India Stack" or "e-Estonia", the hallmarks of digital government. But only part of this will come through others copying Diia's source code. 

Above all else, Ukraine's digital government success story is one that emphasizes the government above the digital, and its claim for global digitalization leadership is founded upon transparency, resilience and collaboration.

Luke Cavanaugh works in government advisory at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in Kyiv and is the co-founder of digital government substack interweave.gov.