Digital Public Infrastructure Day - UN Open Source Week 2026 (Part 3)

Once again, good morning.
We'll do it again one more time for those who are not in the room.
We're going to do a synchronous clap and it's just a one clap and we'll do it until we get it right.
Upon my instruction, we're going to do this.
Clap once if you can hear me.
Perfect.
Wonderful.
Thank you for joining us this morning.
I see that folks are still streaming in.
I again, encourage folks to also fill out the front.
We don't bite over here.
I and thank you for being here on time as well.
I know that there are many things going on.
You could be anywhere else in New York, but you chose to be here with us on DPI Day.
Welcome to DPI Day, the second, I understand, DPI day at the UN Open Source Week.
Open Source Week is co hosted by the UN Office of Digital and Imaging Technologies, as well as the Office of ICT.
We also have member state hosts who are Tanzania, Lesotho, Morocco, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Estonia, and Luxembourg.
I also want to acknowledge in advance the ministerial participation we'll have this morning, which is exciting about a topic like this one.
I myself, I'm your host for today.
I can be a rebel rouser.
I can be the one who ushes you into places, but I'm hoping that we'll have a good time.
My name is Nanda Sble.
I am a senior advocacy officer on digital public infrastructure and inclusive financial systems at the Gates Foundation.
So some things about this day.
This is day three of a long week, but it's exciting once again to see the room has filled out, considering yesterday here was a very filled out house.
Day one on Monday, there was a hackathon and then yesterday was an exciting open source and AI session.
And today is DPI Day, which is aiming to bring together the open source and DPI communities together and to help advance through that, the global Digital compact commitments.
As for our agenda today, we're going to start with an opening fireside chat, followed by a ministerial panel, but then we're going to move around into some breakout sessions before lunch, have enough time for lunch where you can also get to know each other better, and then we'll have another breakout session after lunch, then come back into this room for a closing panel and a closing ceremony.
Not to worry, we'll keep emphasizing these as we go along throughout the day.
The most important part, there will be a reception for those who have the ticket for that.
Now, the next thing I want to point out is a UN digital cooperation portal that has been put together by AD.
For those I want to actually find out if folks can let's do some live participation here by scanning that QR code and getting some thumbs up that folks have reached the portal.
Somebody took a picture and I don't know that that's what they were meant to do.
What this portal is about is that you can register the initiatives you have in your respective areas of work and link them to the Global Digital Compact for visibility when the compact is being reviewed.
It's also a chance to showcase your work on a global platform and portal.
Just checking, we good thumbs up, little thumbs up that we have the link.
Perfect.
Thank you, sir.
Active participation.
Welcomed.
Just some housekeeping rules before we get into the day.
No food and drink are allowed, but your water bottles are safe.
I had to confirm that one.
And people, you pay for your own meals in the cafeteria areas on the third floor where we have lunch or coffee and fourth floor.
To move around, as I mentioned, to the breakout sessions and otherwise, there will be volunteers outside in yellow shirts who can help you move from room to room depending on the sessions that you want to get to.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, I'm hoping that we'll have a great day together.
I am just looking around the room to make sure that I can hand over to the next session Oh, and our moderator is arriving in grand fashion.
We welcome her as she arrives.
I will now hand over to miss Yolanda Martinez, who will be joining us shortly here for the opening fireside session.
Yolanda, welcome very much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much and good morning everyone.
It's an honor to be here.
I truly respect this setting, especially for the voting one entire week to open source topic and within that week, an entire day of discussions for DPI.
Welcome to this initial session.
To get started, I would like to bring an Two amazing leaders to join me for this conversation.
Number one, I'm sorry because literally I was running to get started on time.
Miss Lisa LpCsta.
Did I pronounce your last name correctly? Welcome, Minister of Justice and Digital Affairs of Estonia.
Thank you so much.
I would also like to give the floor and here Minister Sigmon Freel from Dominican Republic.
Maybe he's running like I was literally.
No.
Let's give a couple of minutes and to get everyone's inspire and into that conversation, let me share a little bit of thoughts on why talking about open source and DPI under the framework of the Global Digital Compact is so important.
Number one, the comp remind all of us that digital transformation must be inclusive, must be trusted, and must be country led.
At the World Bank, we have learned that the most successful digital journeys are not just built by countries working alone, but by countries learning from one another and supported by strong partnerships.
I would like to give you some examples of very concrete results coming from working in partnerships across Latin American and the Caribbean, through IDLC Consortium, which is a joint effort funded by the World Bank, the Inter American Development Bank and co develop under the technical working groups of the Latin American Network for the development of eGovernment, Bret Health Countries are advancing cross border digital identity interoperability.
I feel so proud to share today that 83 million Brazilians can access more than 300 public services on Uruguay government portal using their Gold BR digital ID.
More than 12 countries are participating in this effort, including Dominican Republic, which is the chair of Red Heal this year, and will host the regional ministerial meeting later this year as well.
Another example of partnerships is Vinca lack.
For this one, we partner in the World Bank with Coursera to give more than 5,000 scholarship that has been provided across the region based on country contexts and needs.
I'm very happy to share that more than 20,000 courses are being taken by that reflect more than 70,000 hours of learning in areas such as relevant of AI cybersecurity and digital transformation.
Another example of the power partnership is the lack AI accelerator and I know Estonia will share a lot more on this to our conversation, which is a partnership between the Tony Blair Institute, AT&T data and Carnegie Mellon University, where we are working with 18 use cases coming from an open call where we got 59 proposals to put an idea on how to use AI to make government services better into action in just six months.
And last but not least, the women in Golf tech challenge.
I feel very proud because this is a partnership between GIST, the government of Estonia, colleagues of ITU, the World Bank, and the DPI Safe Ws Initiative with you and vet that are investing in the next generation of women leaders in this space.
This year, the initiative graduated its third cohort, bringing the total number of women supported through mentoring, training, and networking opportunities to more than 680 participants across the three editions.
Today, the challenge team will be hosting a workshop at 3:00 P.M.
I encourage everyone interested in scaling women's leadership, and I think we have a great example here, Minister, to join and learn more about this initiative.
These are examples of regional engagements and global engagement, but we're going to have the opportunity to this conversation to learn about specific examples.
We're going to be discussing around three main areas.
What work, What is underway now and how international cooperation matters.
So to kick off the floor and looking back at the country's DPI journey, and I'm super fan of Estonia because when I was the CIO of Mexico, it was one of the first countries I went to visit to learn and to gather inspiration for the digital strategy that we put in place after what we saw, What is the one program or reform at your desk at this very moment that is moving everything around DPI.
What does the next chapter look like when Estonia has been working with NEO for more than two decades now? What is the priority? What are you working on? Thank you for this wonderful introduction.
It's really a great honor to be here to discuss on this very timely and important topic because we are very much talking about open source AI, but you need some infrastructure around that as well.
That is absolutely clear.
Um, Estonia, yes, is a country with 100% of public services, digital.
Everything is connected via a very important infrastructure point, the personal or company code, but also the interoperability between more than 3,000 different databases.
So One of our political decisions has been that we never built a super database because everything should be built on trust and super datatabase is not a good answer if you are looking for a trust.
You asked, what is the one most important thing at my table right now and this is still the inclusion.
So when Estonia as a country has achieved already 100% digital governance, then now going to the next era, that is the AI governance, that is fundamentally different.
Basically, we are at the same place where all the countries are.
Um, despite our previous digital journey, we are richer with our experiences, but we are building new things with AI.
That means now again that nobody should left behind.
We have this principle at the United Nations, but we have this principle also in our country.
That means that with hello.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Having the AI for everybody, nobody left behind, it means that we have to make new political decisions.
Let me give some examples and these are not technological ones.
These are political ones.
First, we have a Prime Minister led initiative, estonia.ai.
Actually, you find it ad.ai at our own language.
And that has every week sessions for absolutely every sector in the society describing and helping how you could use AI.
Also, we have a program together with our public libraries.
Every village has a public library.
And we do not train librarians already from 1990s or we have information specialists because you don't need even a single gadget in Estonia to be a member of digital society, because you can get all the digital services from banking to the state services from the public libraries.
Now we proceed the librarians helping the village people without any gadgets to understand what AI is, how it can change your life.
Maybe you could be part of that, maybe you choose otherwise.
Literally, no one is left behind.
I consider personally this because I'm very keen on equality issues.
I personally consider this as most important technological solution, which is absolutely not technological, that really no one is left behind.
We also include children.
So many countries in the world are discussing banning social media for kids.
Estonia has made the choice otherwise because we have very high results at our PISA tests.
We are doing very well in education, and this is because we have included digital learning already from the very first grades, but also some knowledge already from the kindergarten.
With a state curriculum to everybody, so no child is left behind.
We have AI leap at schools.
That means that already all teachers have got access to AI together with the researchers, but also the kids get gradually full access to AI, not to be only the best users, but to be the best creators of AI, to be the best critical thinkers on the era of AI.
These are just some of the examples.
I would love to share also the technological things.
But for me, as you ask, what is most important, one thing for me, and that is inclusion and that nobody is left behind.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I feel very inspired and maybe you can elaborate a little bit more, especially because education is a very challenging sector.
In most of our countries, I can speak from Latin America, from Mexico that has 129 million people, 25 million children.
How you engage with unions and teachers to incorporate AI in a way that is an incentive and a way to scale the capabilities in working with the kids.
Can you elaborate a little bit more about that negotiation that usually comes at a political level.
Actually, the situation in Estonia is vice versa.
First, our principle for digital services and AI is not that government controls people, but people control government with a data tracker and all the other tools available, and that's the same with the schools and teachers.
The initiative actually did not come politically.
It came from the teachers, from the schools.
We have a very independent teacher system in Estonia, which actually elaborates a lot of different initiatives.
And it is the teachers who actually lead the program together with the academia and universities.
Teachers have free hands the government only gives access, we only pay for the access.
But all the rest is done by the teachers, together with the academia and we very much support the different initiatives.
This is actually the ambience we have here at this week.
That when different people come together, we get better solutions, and that is the same with the teachers in Estonia.
When different teachers in different schools, in remote schools, city schools, different languages put their ideas on the table, experiment, and we have also very supportive university research side for that, also the brain research, development research.
Together, the academia and the teachers are developing, co creating the new ways of learning and politicians do not intervene.
So that is what I truly believe in that the initiative from different people is the breaking point for new innovations.
The only thing that the government does and has done throughout the years is that Estonian government is basically a risk taking government, research based on research, based on very severe risk assessment, but we are open to co creation and research based innovation.
Thank you.
I found extremely interesting this approach of governance, really working with the teachers and giving them the space to define the how? The teachers are working with the government, I would put it that way.
Perfect now.
Thank you for sharing that experience and I'm sure many authorities here, but also representatives from different sectors feel inspired and ready to test these ideas.
Thank you for sharing that.
Welcome, Minister.
Thank you for joining us.
Another country that is a champion in Latin American and the Caribbean, I was sharing with the audience at the beginning the example of ide lac and the amazing work that the consortium is doing.
Allowing country teams to define the priorities on how to integrate into the regional ID broker and the important role of Dominican Republic chairing DC this year and hosting the ministerial meeting.
I would like to give you the floor to also share with audience what is the top policy that is right now at your desk.
And how AI is moving everything and how Dominican Republic is embracing this AI approach.
We learned from Estonia, a very interesting way to allow co creation by providing the right elements of risk teachers and government working together.
What is the journey in Dominican Republic? Well, good morning first.
Thank you, Yolanda, and my greetings to Minister Pcosta and to all the delegates are here today in this open source week.
As you mentioned, Dominican Republic right now is in a very, let's say, sensible moment.
We are as a government since 2020 when President Abinad took office.
He he made a decision and took the path that we have to transformate the whole the government, including the digitization and digital transformation as transversal, let's say, step and mandatory.
We have been working a lot, not only digitizing the whole government, not only creating interoperability, also how to adapt into a world in which every day AI is more active, it's more present, and it's more mandatory to be involved in public service that we offer as a country.
As you mentioned, Yolanda, we have been working in trying to integrate in this ecosystem in the whole Latin America region and Caribbean and trying to be one of the leaders in that area.
First we have to the first three or two years in government try to create, let's say, the governance in the whole country regarding how we have to adapt and how we will produce this ecosystem because when we arrived in government in 2020, we didn't have a clear path or a clear state how the governance of digital transformation should be in the public sector.
And the President Ana has made various executive decisions in which he had established clearly, which is the governance representing the government itself with our minister of public administration who has the leadership in this case in all these actions.
Then after that, we have been working with several multilateral organizations, let's say in three ways.
First, interoperability.
That's very important for us.
We have been dealing a lot with how the institution were structured separately and they were working each one with their own data and their own system.
And their goal was at that point and it was not an easy way to start it, that how we have to interpret and create this one ecosystem in the whole public service and to make them understand that information is not owned by them, but it is owned by the people and is owned by the government itself as a whole.
That was a process in which we have to change the cultural vision and belief of the incumbents and all the public officers in the Dominican Republic to compromise in that vision.
We signed one year ago a very important pact with what we call the Junta Central Electoral, that's the National Identity Office of the Dominican Republic, in order that all the public government offices in Dominican Republic can be interoperability had imity with the Junta and has all the information about the Dominican citizens.
We didn't even have that.
As a government, we didn't have a central information and how to get any data regarding any Dominican citizen in Dominican Republic.
So that's one of the first step that we made and we have advanced a lot in the last 12 months in that part.
Second, last week, we signed or we start the Innovation Center with partnership with NBDA Is this the first innovation center in the whole Caribbean and I think also Latin American in which we are creating the ecosystem with the government, with the private sector, and also with the academia, academia in which to start building this capabilities from students, from teachers with the certifications of MBDia and also private companies that will be partners with the government in the innovation center trying to create this ecosystem in which we can develop AI not only for the public sector, but also how to impact in the private sector.
Also, we have worked a lot in what we call the it well, the DPIs public infrastructure.
The president of I just I think next week he will publish a new executive order in which structuring all the DPI public infrastructure that we don't we still have it in Dominican Republic in order not only to create the governance, but also how we will handle and manage all this infrastructure in Dominican in the country that is very important to keep going in advance.
So I think we have many things to still working ahead.
But right now, we think that we are in a great moment in which.
First, we have transformed the whole cultural vision of the public service of how we must intervene with these platforms, with DPI infrastructure, with AI, all those things.
Second, also, we have also a make debate in the whole country that the public service is going to be better if we adapt and we create and we incorporate AI to the mandate, the most common service that we offer in the Dominican Republic as health, education, other things.
We are working in what we call the proactive service.
We will launch it in November this year or October this year, in which we will create as Estonia already has countries in the world, how we anticipate to the needs of citizens, by cell phones, by any other technological device, we can notify the citizens that you have to go to the hospital, which hospital you have to go, which is the school that you will be placing your children's, how to renew your licenses, things like that.
We're going to launch it in November, what we call the Proactive service.
So also we have received a lot of collaboration from Estonia, and we thank you for that.
So I think we are in a good place right now.
The Dominican Republic is not only we have the goal to transform the Dominican Republic not only as a tourism place that everybody sees us, but also a technological country.
That's very inspiring and congratulations because you have a lot on the table.
Running same mindset within the cabinet and put it interoperability at the service of the citizen, putting the right executive order in place to frame it from a legal certainty point of view, but also creating an AI ecosystem that allowed co creation as Estonia was also sharing on the case in the sector of education.
And positioning such a beautiful country as a digital hub, as an innovation hub for the region.
I think that sets a very good intro for the second round in this conversation, which is around international cooperation and why spaces like this matter so much.
Maybe now we're going to start that way around.
If you can elaborate a little bit more, you mentioned and you thank Estonia, I also express my gratitude for all the learnings I got when I was leading Mexico national digital strategy.
But if you could both elaborate on how international cooperation help shape the digital journey that each of your countries are currently taking.
If you can share since this is DPI day and we run over the principles of modularity, reusability, and a standard base, what solution idea you have taken from another countries, how regional engagements and regional and global initiatives have played a role in how you are shaping and implementing and scaling your digital transformation journeys.
Well, for the Dominican Republic, it has been very important in the collaboration of not only countries like Estonia, but also in the multilateral sector.
First, I want to repeat again that we thank Estonia because they are helping us with the ER platform and also in areas like cybersecurity.
They are very important for us that we are trying to improve and Estonia are collaborating with us in the last few months with that.
Also, we have a very good relationship with the Emirates that are helping us also in digitalizing and transformation in some services in the Dominican Republic like immigrations and education teams.
Also, as you know, Yolanda, the W Bank and the IBD has been very active in the Dominican Republic in the last two or three years with our ministers and working first the IBD trying to create this whole ecosystem and clear governance path in the Dominican Republic, in the transfer in the digital prospect.
We have a program for almost $30 million with the IBD.
We are right now working first in creating in this ministry itself as a leader this culture about how the digital infraformation should be taken and how we can also reflected on our brothers and our colleagues and partners in the public sector.
Also, we are creating the first time in the Dominican Republic with the support of IBD, we didn't have a central platform that, let's say, centralize all the human research and all the public service in Dominican Republic of functionaries and how we provide the services.
We are right now very advanced in that process and we should have it finalized by the end of the year trying to incorporate all the entities in Dominican Republic to operate through this platform.
The World Bank, we are in the process of modernization, as we call it.
It's a very important program that we have over there, which include, as I mentioned before, right now, what we call the Practic service and other initiatives that we are working with the World Bank, including capabilities, very important interoperability.
Also the matter of AI, we just launched two weeks ago the first a program in AI for public servant, 2000 scholarships for 2000 it was amazing.
The whole public service wanted to participate in the program.
So that reflects the interest that the public servant has in this matter.
So, For us, without the cooperation of countries like Estonia, like the Emirates, without the cooperation, the multilateral organizations like the World Bank, IBD, and also in these spaces, was very difficult to get to achieve what we have achieved up to this point.
So we support.
That's why we have been coming here every time that you invite us because it's very important to receive also experience from countries that already have done this path that years this is what we are doing in Dominicoan Republic.
It's a good place not only to receive the good experience, but also the mistakes that you have made so we can solve it and do it also as a country.
Thank you.
Very inspiring and now from Estonia, but a quick recap on what you kindly share.
Concrete E X rote.
For anyone in the room that would like to follow up on that experience, the minister is here with his team, but also the role of multilateral development banks, and we're doing a lot of work.
There is a session this afternoon on DPI financing.
We're working a lot on creating knowledge, products, best practices on how to procure, reach out into the different events today and Estonia.
Why digital cooperation matters so much? Thank you.
Thank you for the very good words.
Thank you so much and we are really hoping for a continuous, very good cooperation.
Starting from X rode, this is basically an architecture for interoperability that is both extremely cyber secure, but at the same time, very well suitable for the AI era as well because it has basically the computing capacities in between and it is an open source.
So if anybody wants to use it, there are already many countries but also many organizations who use it.
Because it's an open source, it is a very good opportunity to at least think about it.
Estonia, with this X road experience has shown that when one government has a good experience with an open source solution, it is a trustable way for other governments also to proceed and that saves a lot of money, that saves a lot of time, but also it saves the mistakes.
It was very fun that you mentioned it because I think one of the strengths of Estonia is that we are open with our mistakes and it is maybe good to work with us because we rarely tell honestly what didn't work out for us and what did.
And because of this open source matters so much, we get also good information back from other countries.
Every country invents something new on that and that helps us also to build new details on the existing.
We are one of the grounders of Govstk Govstak is basically a shared architecture possibility between governments.
That is, again, very important not only for the cybersecurity, not only for the trustable solutions, but it is very important also to save the money of the taxpayers for much more fun things like education, health care, and so on.
We have a shared architecture portal within Estonia, but we also share internationally and we really see that for a small country like Estonia is, it is very important that we co create, that we learn from each other, and that really enables us to offer the most important thing, the trustable, secure, best ever services for our citizens at the lowest cost possible.
So the international cooperation, the international sharing Even if it's just the technical sharing of architecture, it is extremely effective for all these goals to be fulfilled.
The third thing I would like to mention is the trust within the cybersecurity issues that you also mentioned.
We are living in the world where cybersecurity is every minute more important than it was the last minute.
We see that the Good countries are using the wonderful possibilities we are talking here all about.
But we also see that there are bad guys out there and we see the huge growing amount of cyberattacks led by AI, but not only So this is an area where the international cooperation is extremely valuable because we are looking back to historical evidence that we have had.
We have got agreements against pirates, we have got agreements against international crime.
So the cybersecurity area is the area where the United Nations has given good examples, good concrete documents, and this work should go on because this is something Every cyberattack usually has an overspill, and this is something that no country can stand against alone.
For Estonia as a small democratic country, international cooperation, multilateralism, law and order internationally is extremely important to save the lives of our people, to save the democracy, to keep the liberties, to keep the human rights we are used to.
Thank you.
Very inspiring, and I think we are fully aligned.
The digital transformation should be an enabler of human rights and to guarantee a safe space for everyone and to close and to summarize, we are in the open source week.
What is the expectation of you as minister of this week and what will be the recommendation for the community on what output are we expecting to deliver to the Global Digital Compact review.
We want to start here.
Estonia has open source by default.
This is our political decision, has been a political decision for a long time because we rarely see the absolutely good sides of that.
Maybe just again underlining the efficiency, the cybersecurity, but also the possibility to learn from each other and to offer better services to our citizens.
One thing that we are looking for very much is that we are moving towards International agreements on that to the international level of interoperability because the world we are looking for is that, More and more of our countries, for example, if we are talking open source and DPI together are using digital documents.
We are used to travel from one country to another with our paper documents.
We need international agreements to travel with digital documents.
This is just one example why we can't go on alone, why we need international cooperation on all that.
It's not only documents, we are building already cross border services with many countries so that the one and same service is available from the governments in several countries.
This is extremely good for the citizens because then you can enjoy really the best sides of every country.
It can save your health.
It is good for education, just some examples.
Let us imagine how beautiful our world would be if we have really functioning cross border services, the best from each country cross border functioning.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, actually, I want that at the end of this week, these two days to get a stronger sense that DPI and open source community are more eager to go from ideas to implementation.
That's very important for us.
For the Dominican Republic, open source is not only a matter of cost, it's also a matter of sovereignty, a matter of transparency of efficiency, So we need that to be implemented in every way.
And we need tools to govern, we need tools to secure data.
So for us, it's very important that they open source, get more stronger and receive a more cooperation in that sense.
And I brought three ideas last night and I want to read it.
What for us is very important.
First, production ready digital public goods and reference architectures that country can trust and adapt.
Second, practical safeguards that can be embedded into real implementation, not only discussed as principles, it's very important for us.
Third, better cooperation between governments as we have it.
Development partners, as we have a few also, funders and operational communities.
Countries like Dominican Republic can scale safely and sustainability insofar as important.
Finally, I will add one more point financing.
We need digital investment models and that reward use that interoperability and national capability.
A portal may solve one problem, but a shared digital rate can solve many.
On our side, the Dominican Republic want to stay true to the commitments of the global digital compact and the pipe of the future through implementations.
Our hopes is that by the end of the week, the GDC review, we can say that the GDC help countries to move from digital ambition to digital capability.
From pilots to infrastructure and from fragmented project to trusted digital public service that improves people's lives.
I think that this kind of discussion is very important for countries as Dominican Republic that they're in the path to establish DPIs, established open source, but we need more help.
We need collaborations from countries that already have done and have more advanced ecosystem in the digital transformation.
I think that we are in a good path.
I think we have great collaborators, but we need to be more into, let's say, to materialize things.
Discussions are good, but we have to receive implementation.
We have to receive collaborations, how to implement things.
Thank you both.
Very inspiring conversation.
I think ready to kick off the day.
If I have to zommarize all these exchanges, this community as international community of DPI, are committed to co create, to provide the right principles but also the right approaches to go from pilots to scaling and to make sure that no one is left behind.
Thank you so much and I would like to give the floor to Nanjera Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you once again to Yolanda and the ministers for such an inspiring session.
As they're taking their picture, we're going to have a short intermission that allows you to actually talk to the person next to you, but at the same time, I want to introduce a second QR code to you.
Across the desks for those who are seated around desks, there is a QR code to share your feedback for every session that is very much appreciated by the organizers of this DPI day.
As you chat with your neighbor, we'll continue in just 5 minutes.
Do take advantage of also taking a snapshot of that QR code.
Thank you, and we'll continue in 5 minutes.
Thank you.
I think it's time for this.
I.
I and we're trying to trying to pull them together like that recently Okay.
Are we all set? Energy coming up.
I didn't bother you yesterday with questions, so today my question mark.
I believe there should be issue.
I the R, we have to make a decision.
Thank you.
Hello.
Hello, DPI Da Peeps.
Calling the room to order.
I hope the 5 minutes for interaction have brought back some energy in the room.
Good.
Kindly take your seats.
We'll be continuing with the next session shortly.
Lovely.
All right.
In the spirit of the day, we'll do my little favorite thing.
Just to make sure we are now back in the room.
We'll do it one more time.
Clap once if you can hear me.
Wonderful.
Well, that fireside chat did bring up something towards the end around how are we going to do all this and how we're going to do it all together.
This panel is going to talk to us about turning global commitments into action.
Our moderator for this lovely session will be the wonderful Under Secretary-General, Mr.
Amy Gil.
I hand over to you to take over from here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Nanjira and good morning, everyone.
There is a backstory to Nanjira.
I don't know if she's already mentioned it.
She was a member of the Secretary-General high level panel on digital cooperation.
When DPGs DPIs were not buzzwords like they are today, so she helped us put together the right framework for thinking about these issues, not only the exciting opportunities, but also the safeguards and the community engagement.
Nanjira so wonderful to have you with us.
Um, ladies and gentlemen, we have a most exciting and distinguished panel this morning.
So I will be very brief.
In the Global Digital compact, member states made real commitments on digital public infrastructure, to invest in them, I think that's very, very important.
Find the financing, mobilizing the financing that makes this possible at the level of countries.
To build systems that are safe, inclusive, interoperable, and rights respecting and to treat digital public goods as digital commons so that they are not only serving the countries and the communities inside of borders, but they're also contributing to the global public good.
Those were very, very powerful commitments and we've been working hard, all of you have been working hard to translate them into concrete actions.
So very soon, these commitments will be reviewed as part of the overall review of the Global Digital compact starting in late 2027 and going into 2028.
So the review will be as consequential as the actions that preceded and what is discussed then will depend on what governments, UN entities, and I'm so delighted to be joined by Aha today and the wider ecosystem actually due in the 18 months between now and then I'd ask everyone in the room to think of this not as a panel, but as a working session that plans ahead strategically with that review in mind.
We have governments on this panel, we have international organization, governments who made commitments, now putting them into practice.
And on the other hand, the institutions with the capacity to support them.
I'm going to pose a question, a broad question at the start to each one of the speakers in turn and that question is, where does your country stand in implementing the GDC commitments on digital public infrastructure and what areas of progress would you highlight and what are the priorities for the coming 18 months? I want to start with you, Your Excellency, Salima Manor Mava, the Minister of Communications Technology and Innovation of the Republic of Sierra Leone.
Thank you so much.
And for that, I would really like to start by thanking yourself for really organizing this week.
It's been a great session of really enlightening conversations and look forward to more of them, and also congratulate you on being able to put together fantastic panels of all female representation.
There's no risk of a manor here, so absolutely Um, thank you for that.
And also for the opportunity to C Leon to participate and share our experiences.
I think more specifically, I like what you said about, let it be a start of our conversations around this a couple of years of implementing the GDC and to see what's worked well, what hasn't, and how we can all plan together for that next phase of development.
Um, with Civiilon specifically, we were really excited by the adoption of the GDC because we saw it as one of those first steps in bringing together critical stakeholders to agree on the phase of development and moving beyond just the wordings of commitments, but really narrowing down to see what do we so government, development partners, private sector, and all of these elements are critical for the digital advancement as we see it, and that's why we're really supportive of the GDC and been quite keen to see how it progresses and contributes to that development.
For Ceon a lot of focus for us has gone into looking at the foundation or the foundation layer, so to speak, with regards to connectivity because you can't talk about payment, instance payment, you can't talk about ID system, and you can't talk about interoperability without connectivity.
And being there.
So far, that's been a huge area of focus.
Over these last couple of years, we've been focusing on advancing connectivity coverage to now, we believe we're at around 90% coverage of population or four G coverage within a significant progress in just a short couple of years in ensuring that citizens, regardless of where they sit, have access to connectivity.
We've expanded our fiber backbone layer.
We've improved on our redundancy.
We've also interconnected with our our neighboring countries because we also saw that as a way to reduce dependency within the country, we're making sure that we're connected through the backbone to our neighboring country, Republic of Guinea.
We're also making progress to connect with Liberia and we see all of these as critical Um, Al, progress for us has been made around digital ID system with the National civil registration authority making significant progress on, I think around 80% of ID, that's been also significant.
We're also moving now, working with other partners to look at digital identity program of itself and how we ensure that and it really becomes a single point of truth and integrating with other government systems as we roll out.
And really, maybe in the spirit of this being really a conversation, I think what I would Good.
From these conversations, I really think one of the benefits for us would be maybe to learn from others, specifically around once we have the registration ID information, how do we really ensure that all of the new government systems roll out? This really becomes a single point of truth because I think we're still at the risk of duplicate ID programs being rolled out of course.
That's an area that we're looking to tackle and improve upon.
Progress has been made around, um Payment systems with our mobile money, the improvements of our mobile money ecosystem, improvements around digital payment, also happening with also the rollout of the payment switch in Cy Leon as well, that would support interoperability.
And then maybe I'll end by on exchange as well.
Again, progress has been made.
The Ministry of Finance right now is rolling out interoperability exchange layer for the financial sector, which we're hoping to then scale, of course.
We decided to go with a model of choosing one sector to deal with before we scaled up and the finance sector being one of the most advanced when it comes to digital transformation.
We thought it was a good place to tackle that there and install and put all of these in place, which will then allow us to scale that across all sectors and as we go along.
And maybe one of the areas which we're also still working on within that is around data governance standardization when we think about it and how do we do that for the whole of government.
We've been able to think through the ministry or the financial sector, when we think of the whole of government and how do we put those standards in place? So once we have the infrastructure that those would be embedded.
So those are areas that we're working on and the areas of our next phase of development.
But when it comes to the DPI and the foundational elements, we believe a lot of progress has been made.
We're working with our regional partners on cross border digital trade to make sure that as we're developing these foundation, we're doing it in a way that would ensure that it would enable cross border digital trade because for us, that's a key area of priority.
If we look at the echas region with His Excellency, the President, doctor Julius Maaby of Civilon currently serving as the chair of EchOS.
One of his priority areas has been for ECOS to go back to its original mandate, which was the economic integration as a critical pillar for peace and security across the region.
So for Cyilian, a lot of focus has been going to how do we really ensure we're setting up the standards for cross border digital trade because we believe that that is what we need to do to look at the next phase of development within the region.
But just a few experiences of what's been happening in Serian and we look forward to further engagements and collaboration.
Thank you.
Amazing.
Thank you, Minister.
Love the way you've stacked it up.
All the way to the regional cooperation dimension.
Let me now turn to Professor Ama, Morocco's experience is one of the five largest data markets in Africa, within your own region from your national perspective, also your own expertise in this area.
We welcome your thoughts.
Thank you very much for the introduction.
Amon deep.
Morocco is fully aligned with the GDC endorsed by member states as part of the Pact for the future adopted by consensus at the UN General Assembly in September 224.
If I want to provide all the developments in Morocco, it would be very huge.
I would prefer to give you some very important initiatives maybe to summarize.
Morocco has launched the Morocco Digital 2003 30 strategy.
This national strategy is based on two complimentary axes.
The first one is the digitalization of public services and the second one is the development of the digital economy.
So it is driven by four cross cutting levers.
Digital talents.
We do a lot of work towards digital talents, including young people 4-18, also at universities, also some specific categories like women, et cetera.
The second cross cutting lever is artificial intelligence, which has been pushed forward and artificial intelligence in Morocco has its own roadmap.
Outsourcing, we do a lot of things in outsourcing and offshoring.
To give you just an example, in Morocco, we opened two big companies and now we can count 1,200 companies, foreign companies in Morocco doing offshoring, digital export and employing 143,000 young people and engineers in Morocco.
As you know, Moroccan engineers are very well targeted in the digital market and something we are very proud of.
Maybe the last thing is connectivity and data infrastructure.
This is the last pillar of this strategy.
For example, we launched the five G network last November and we covered already 50 cities in Morocco.
We have also covered more than 1,400 regions by four G during the first phase of the deployment of this program of connectivity.
We also, invest a lot in infrastructure from data center and compute point of view.
We can say that in Morocco, if we take the data center capability globally, We have project that more than 1 gigawatt.
The most important data center is under study in the South in Dala region with 500 megawatts.
This data center is intended to provide capacity storage, but also compute for 20% for Moroccan a country, but the 80% will be dedicated to the neighboring of Morocco in the West of Africa.
So many things about connectivity, data centers, compute, but which is a very important also to mention is our three structural initiatives underway.
The first one isdity in Arabic means my administration, and this is a platform or architecture of interoperability connecting multiple public administrations around sovereign digital identity in court to the national electronic identity card issued by the general direction of National Security.
This means that we build interoperability between administrations, all the ministers, for example, or public administration, using identity card, which is issued by this sovereign national entity.
This is very important for us because this all two things in our approach, we pay huge attention to two things in all what we do in digital affairs.
The first one is privacy by design.
How to give the protection to citizens in this a huge data error.
The second one is security by design.
Because all the digital infrastructures are matter of cyberattacks today over the world, and we play a very huge attention to preserve this security and privacy by design, even in our law, in the architecture itself of our identity, we take into account these two aspects because From one hand, we protect the country and from the other we protect also citizens in this era of digital.
Dtxt or for exponential, because all these technologies are exponentials is an interoperability architecture connecting, as I said, multiple public administrations, for now, eight institutional agreements have been signed, and we work very closely with, I will not give the name because it doesn't mean that much for you, but the spirit is that we have to work with cybersecurity office public office, our regulator for data protection, et cetera We are not doing this as ministry alone, but we work with four other institutions that count when it comes to privacy and security by design.
The second framework I would like to highlight here is The legal framework and we do something very original, I think, and very disruptive.
We have a lot of aspects of simplification of procedures.
You in many countries that we started pushing on the table procedures to have access to administration.
And over the years, these procedures become more and more complicated, sophisticated and there is no design from the beginning for these different levels of expansion, for example.
What we do is we use AI, artificial intelligence to simplify these procedures, and we can give you more details if you're interested because it's very important to clean the scene to have new procedures while keeping the function of the old procedures, but to do it in a very clean way and while introducing AI and new techniques to do it.
This legal framework is something very important that support also my administration dot o, and we propose local digital dot o because it supports dot o to provide all the mechanisms for simplification, but also for the protection of the country and also the citizens.
Maybe one more initiative is the network of Jari Institutes.
This is a very important for us, at least, very important initiative.
Because Jasiri, as you know, is a researcher that lives in 12th century.
It's somebody who created the first automata in the world.
It is considered as the first robotician in the world.
But besides the name, Jaar Institute is a physical space where we put researchers, start uppers, stakeholders, administrations, and schools to create the a huge ecosystem to develop solutions and to solve real world.
I mean, the problems or issues that we face in our daily life.
We have in Morocco, 12 regions, and we have one institute of Excellence per region.
In each center or institute of Excellence, we have this whole ecosystem that work closely to provide solutions and to solve problems.
And as ministry, we fund this institutes.
For example, we have schools like U Code, for those who know 42 school in Europe, Code, and these kind of things.
But we have also schools dedicated to civilian servants, to doctors, to physicians, et cetera Because today if we want that AI go ahead, we need Of course, infrastructure, we need talents, but we need talents across the whole disciplines, not only talents at the university.
Because when they want to work on AI, they need to understand the problems of the physicians, of the engineers, et cetera In our idea, it is very important to bring these courses also to everybody depending on the expertise.
For example, civilian servants will not use AI to digitalize the administration if they are not comfortable with that.
That is the idea and of course, we also push for the development of these solutions and we provide the whole necessary infrastructure like data center, like clusters, like GPU, et cetera Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Yes.
I really appreciate, Minister, the reference to the compute and data center infrastructure, all of Africa, just 1% of the global data center capacity, and this new project would add significantly to that capacity and also the references that you made to security and the development of cross domain talent so necessary for the AI turn.
Thank you so much.
Now we'll go to another very important and exciting region, and that's the Caribbean.
Minister Adré Marx, your reflections, please.
Thank you, Undersecretary and moderator, Secretary Gill, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
Jamaica has moved beyond mere commitment and is now firmly in the implementation phase of our digital public infrastructure journey.
We are actively converging our foundational building blocks, including the national identification card, the Jamaica data exchange platform, and our National Identification and registrations center with 24 access for citizens.
We have really put a focus on the data exchange platform to ensure data sharing, and the most exciting part of what we are doing now is also building out our national broadband network.
It is currently designed to represent a transformative national investment that is expected to connect up to 2,768 government locations, including schools while extending our high speed broadband access to approximately 490,000 homes across Jamaica, including 140,000 households in underserved communities.
This initiative will significantly strengthen digital inclusion, expand access to opportunity, and help bridge Jamaica's connectivity divide.
The government has also just recently in April, signed with a Transamerica fiber system for a new subsidy cable into Jamaica.
This will dramatically increase Jamaica's Internet speed up to 20 terabytes.
We are focusing on connectivity with the new subsidy cable to expand broadbandwidth, improve redundancy, and lower costs into a cohesive national digital stack.
We are further building a digital document wallet for electronically storing verifiable credentials, reducing the need to rely on paper based records.
This transformation is designed to deliver tangible citizen value, reducing bureaucracy through ones only service delivery, and ensuring that digital transformation translates into a seamless, trusted experience for all Jamaicans.
So we have now for this year, financial year, we're spent over $100 million to build out these systems, and looking ahead, our priorities are to integrate the SAC into a singular national framework, expand our online service catalog, and build the public sector capacity necessary to transform these systems from individual projects into a seamless citizen experience.
Thank you, Mr.
Moderri.
Thank you very much, Minister, for that valuable perspective from your region.
So we've heard from Evars, the Marghreb region, the Caribbean, and now we'll go to Central Asia.
Minister, you have the floor.
Thank you so much, Mr.
Gill, Your excellency, dear guest.
Yeah, I'm representing Pakistan.
It's country the Central Asia.
We also have some achievements in the government platform, for example, our rating in the UNDP and UN development and indexes to date 24 and our government platforms include the top nine platform in the world, but it's one question we clearly understand.
Today I tried to share our vision.
I think if we make and work together, we try to our cooperation.
And many countries have already made a significant progress in building digital service platforms and digital public infrastructure.
The more important question is what comes next.
We increasingly see digital public infrastructure as a foundation.
The real purpose of digital transformation is not simply to digitalize government, is to change the relationship between the citizens and the state.
For decades, governments have been organized around institutions, administrative boundaries, but the people do not leave their lives through institutions.
They experience lives through the events, the needs, and moments.
The true opportunity of technology is to make government adapt to people's lives rather than requiring people to adapt the government process.
That is why we believe that the next stage of the EA native government, it's when not government that simply after my existing processes, but government that becomes more responsive, more proactive, and more human centered.
For the last two decades, we have been building digital states.
Perhaps the next decade should be about the connecting them.
Today, data, documents, and digital services often stop at the national borders, even so people, businesses, trade, and ideas do not.
If we can build trust and digital bridges between countries, we can reduce frictions, accelerate economic cooperation, facilitate mobility, and make public services more accessible across borders.
This sense, the future of the digital transformation, it's not only about connecting people to the digital world.
It's also about connecting digital states to one another.
For us, there is two key message.
First is a digital public infrastructure should evolve into a native government.
It's truly centered around the people.
The second, the next of international cooperation, maybe building trust digital between our countries.
Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much, Minister Baka.
The example you brought in of connecting digital states, that's a very powerful one.
This is a similar digital bridge between Estonia and Finland when it comes to digital health.
And Minister, you referred to it in the context of the digital trade where the African continent is trying to build a common share digital economy that gives scale to entrepreneurs and also facilitates the life of um, individuals in our increasingly globalized world.
So I'm going to now turn to my dear colleague, Aa, Assistant Secretary-General from UNDP and newly appointed Secretary-General for the Office of African Affairs.
Aa, you've heard from the ministers and Often countries turn to UNDP.
UNDP is the partner that supports member states in turning these commitments, the GDC goals into local delivery.
How do you react to what you heard from the ministers and how does UNDP respond to what comments are asking for? Thank you so much, Made.
It's a pleasure really to be here and just listening to the conversation.
For those of us who have worked in the development world for so long and have imagined a future, a world, have dreamed of this world where everyone has enough, where needs are met.
Listening today, I thought, actually, that world we just previously imagined and dreamed of that future is possible.
It's not only possible as a distant wish that will happen someday, it is happening now.
This hope today is a very rare commodity.
But in this room, we are embracing, witnessing hope unfold before us in a world that is not given to that.
I am so thrilled to hear what I've heard from the ministers here today.
I want to add three more countries to this list.
In Tanzania, we have now the national instant payments, which called TIPS, which processes over 450 million transactions worth over $12 billion in just a single year.
It was just a fraction before this time.
We look at Rwanda, which has launched the IRMbo platform.
And that has brought over 100 public services.
Just think about that for a second online.
This is fundamentally transforming how rural people interact with their state.
Now you look at Nigeria, the most populous country on the African continent, which has scaled its national identity register to over 100 million people.
I think these are really powerful signals of what is possible.
Yet, we know that this picture is uneven across the African continent, for instance, and there is so much more that needs to be done.
I guess that's why we're having the conversation.
The reality is that African countries, for instance, continue to struggle with a set of common yet often invisible challenges, the challenges of trust, for instance, which is really key in everything we're talking about, but also coordination and knowledge.
These frictions turn into invisible costs that are borne by everyday citizens.
Imagine that we have over 500 million.
If we have over 500 million people who lack a verifiable identity, It means every basic transaction will stall.
It means that they cannot access credit, they cannot save, they cannot access insurance or the services that they are owed.
That is for us a development silencer.
When public service delivery operates in paper based donor funded silos, coordination becomes painfully slow and quite leaky, wasting the very resources that we need at a moment when development financing is also declining and every dollar must count.
And when we are navigating public services requiring dealing with fragmented data or expensive intermediaries, knowledge stops being an equalizer.
It becomes a structural barrier that's keeping ordinary entrepreneurs and small businesses locked out of their own digital economy.
So digital ID interoperable data and AI built on safe and inclusive DPI foundations, as we've been hearing, hold the key to removing some of these barriers.
And I think UNDP is really committed, Amani for on this, working with African countries and other countries and the entire DPI ecosystem to build safe, inclusive, and deeply trusted DPI embedded with robust data privacy safeguards.
We think this has to be done, from the design stage through to the national development elaboration.
It shouldn't be an afterthought.
Our analysis shows that the single biggest blocker to achieving this vision actually achieving it at scale.
It's not the lack of political will, as we've heard every government that's spoken, the will is there.
It's the lack of structural financing and innovative financing, but also investment ready national projects, and that's where we come in.
This week we're excited to be launching a new initiative which is our Africa accelerator for DPI.
The idea here is really to work with countries over the next 18 months in an intensive partnership that timed to the global review.
And in creating a platform and the platform will provide a structured pathway for digital readiness diagnostics.
It will mobilize specialized technical expertise and actively build the pipelines of investment ready projects that are required to unlock available sovereign and concessional finance.
Everyone says capital is not the issue, it's not the problem.
It exists.
But how do we unlock it for initiatives like this? That's the question that we'll be answering through this platform.
And this is designed explicitly as a structured platform for all ecosystem players to engage with us so that we can actually work collectively within countries and finally stop driving these critical foundations as uncoordinated fragmented pilots.
These are not pilots anymore.
The infrastructure of the future is being built right now and I think we have to make sure it is built right, but also we have to make sure that it's built for everyone.
That's where UNDP's heart is right now.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ana, and you put your finger on these critical blockers, financing, technical capacity, institutional readiness, and really value our partnership with UNDP on the DPI safeguards framework and these initiatives aimed at unlocking innovative financing.
So, You've heard the panel.
We're going to skip the next round and go straight to Q&A because this is a conversation and we want to hear from you.
Perhaps two questions from the audience, and then we come back for a final reflection and please keep these questions brief, no speeches, keep them very specific and address the issues that our panelists have raised.
The floor is open.
I see one hand there at the back.
Gzman, if you can help.
Yes, you got your mic switched on.
Madam, you have the floor.
Hi, can you hear me? Great.
Thank you so much for all the information you've shared.
It's really inspiring to see countries that sometimes you consider small but have achieved so much.
My question is around governance.
I was really looking forward to hearing some more in addition to what you've already shared is what were your challenges when implementing governance using open source and how did you work around it? Because I'm sure this is a topic on many people's mind.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for that.
You've set the standard for a brief pointed question.
Next one over there, Anir, please call for the mic.
Thank you very much.
Very inspiring set of discussions.
I was particularly inspired by hearing about institutional issues and also what I would call incentive type of issues.
Why would I do this for specific public servants, politicians, and also private sector.
Institutional and incentives.
I was also very taken by the Honorable Minister from Morocco talking about how AI is being used for process simplification.
Would like to hear about how you're addressing the institutional legacy barriers using AI and incentive issues using AI because I think it's the way of the future using AI for design of institutions and design of digital transformation, but I wanted to know a bit more.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for those two issues, governance, and then institutional design incentives around that.
The question was asked by someone who knows how that worked in Bangladesh.
Minister, your reflection about how different ministries needed to come together and start appreciating the need to move away from siloed investments and vendor driven vendor specific technologies.
Maybe we can start with you.
Thank you very much and definitely thank you for that question and definitely appreciate the question because in C Leon, this is something we've tackled with as well and had to really think through.
Specifically for a country who's a founding member of the DPGA who has long committed to the opportunities and the potential of open source to accelerate our digital transformation agenda.
It's something at the ministry, I've been grappling with, how do we also ensure that across government reflected this position is reflected? So what we um, ended up doing was to actually have and develop an open source for policy supported by our partners at UNICEF, have been really critical for us because even though this has been a government uncoded policy position, but I think really detailing it down to a policy document that's adopted by cabinet has been critical because I think what we also try to engage with other government institution is open source first doesn't mean open source must.
What we're communicating is to say where there is an open source alternative, we're ensuring that government considers that and explores that option instead of going immediately to the proprietary based solution.
So we've been able to get this adopted with our Ministry of Finance, with our public procurement agency, as well as our audit agency because we see it as a way once this has been embedded within their process as well, they also help us to enforce it.
Because one of the things we know with some of these policies, sometimes if you don't have a enforcement mechanism, sometimes it could get ignored.
So we've been able to do that and we're working towards that.
But I think it also leads towards the question you were asking around, institutions and how do we ensure that we work through institutions and adoption of this? The experience within this has been really critical in understanding how do we work across all government agencies to get to buy in for that.
One of the things that we'll be able to do around this, we have a digital government legislation.
Again, within that, we're establishing a digital development agency.
Because one of the things we've recognized when it comes to the procurement of digital services, sometimes every institution kind of wants to run and do their own thing.
So we're just ensuring that we have regulations around how we manage and procure these digital services and making sure that we're really looking out for some of the critical elements that the ministry considers that we must, you know, embark.
So governance aspects of technology has been critical.
I think rightly so, technology always moves faster than the law does.
I think that's just how it happens in every society.
We usually are catching up with the governance and regulations, always coming behind, which is not a bad thing.
It's good to see how sometimes it plays out instead of and not let regulation stifle progress, but they are also critical.
We're working towards to make sure that our regulation catches up with the digital advancement that's happening.
Thank you.
Thank you, Minister.
Maybe I can come to you, Professor Amar.
No.
Thank you.
I think when it comes to institutions, which is very important, is to conduct the change, to say, you have procedures.
The procedures have been built over the years and now in software, for example, you can add codes, codes and codes and at given moment, you have to clean the whole thing.
In our procedures, there are two things.
This accumulation of various layers over the years, but also some simplification, legal simplifications, relaxation of some constraint.
For example, in Morocco for many decades, you had to a provide a document that has been certified.
We call it legalization, certified by another entity.
This kind of legalization disappear with digital because if the document is issued by the administration, so that's the proof that the document is original.
No need to go to a third institution to get it legalized.
This is, for example, a just an example of how we can relax some constraints in these procedures.
In many procedures, we move from six days if you want to do it as usual to 20 minutes without moving to any administration, only by digital procedures.
And Something very important we work on is we explain, everybody knows that there is resilience index, and this resilience index is also applied to the administration.
If you want, for example, to get the service in a very short time, You have to adopt some technologies.
You have to adopt storage, you have to have compute, et cetera what we do is we explain to administration that the resilience is also a matter of using new technologies and having the necessary infrastructure.
It works more or less.
In some countries, they just cut the finance of the administration.
It's not yet the case in Morocu and I think we will not be able to cut money.
But it's a way to enforce laws, but we are not taking this direction.
We create some network at the level.
We take responsibilities of all administrations.
We have meetings, we conduct this change by explaining things.
For example, we have some lectures, some master class for how to move to Cloud.
How to digitalize.
Sometimes we provide also tools to process documents.
In Morocco, we have built the official document for all the loans, et cetera, which is right now in a big book everywhere in the administration.
Now it is digitalized.
How many es, I think, until 12 years digitalization of this document.
When people see that They gain time, they gain effort, they improve the service.
They are not against the change, but we have to show exactly where they take benefit.
Of course, administration is always very heavy.
They want to provide service as secure as possible.
It starts of this is why in my first intervention, I said, security and privacy by design are very important in particular in administration.
I think.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
The incentives go down to the level of citizens as well.
Thank you for those valuable perspectives.
Maybe just one thing.
Yes, please.
If I can.
There are two things we take care of it dignity of citizens and illiteracy.
We talk about technology, emerging technology, like everybody is able to use technology, everybody is able to interact with technology.
In our administration, we develop chat bots, for example, for illiterate women or men and we take care of this dignity because if we have to think of this digital divide, which is more or less present depending on the countries.
In Morocco, we still have 30% in the countryside that cannot read or write.
We have to take this.
If we want to implement all these ideas, we have, of course, to form talents, but also in some situation, you have to provide tools.
You cannot send them to school again, some part of the population.
This is something dignity is the motto in our approach.
Inclusion by design.
Thank you, Minister.
Minister Marx, your final reflections, please? Yes.
I wanted to share, Mr.
Moderator, that in Jamaica, the approach was to literally transform government from the very top.
So the new ministry that I lead of efficiency, innovation, and digital transformation, by policy, the Prime Minister has put this ministry to cut across all government agencies, ministries and departments.
So I think that policy imperative is important in in giving the authority to have real digital transformation in countries.
The second thing that we have done since we are in the office now is that we have implemented the Jamaica data exchange platform.
As I mentioned earlier, this data exchange platform is really our major foundation initiative because it allows authorized government systems to exchange information electronically in a controlled and standardized way.
It allows institutions to securely verify information directly at source instead of requiring citizens to carry documents everywhere.
We think of it as a trusted digital bridge connecting government agencies and businesses, which means, for example, if someone wants to open a bank account, their identity can be verified in real time using their national ID card.
No more various forms, no more going to various places.
We see this as a way to have a major shift from turf government to joined up government, from data cells to data sharing, from fragmented systems to integrated interoperable government, from slow manual processes to real time seamless services.
I think Carlo just mentioned that one as our main initiative to answer the question of moving from silos.
Thank you.
Great.
Love that.
We're trying to do the same at the UN.
We're trying to do the same at the UN, moving from turf to jointedness and silos to interoperable one UN responses.
Minister Baka, please, your final reflections.
Look at the clock.
Yeah.
In our country, I think faces some different challenges.
But in our view, the most significant limitation today is not just financing or maybe accessible to technology, access to technology because computing power is becoming more available.
It's knowledge spreads faster than even before that matters even more, it's a willingness of the governments and institution to embrace and implement changes in our countries.
Digital transformation, I think is not only technological process.
It's above the all in the process for the change and the speed of the change is shaped by the quality of our institutions, the effectiveness of governments and the ability systems to adapt to new realities.
The second important factor is the cultural context.
Every country has their own history, traditions, levels of trust.
As a result, the same technology can be adapted very differently across the countries.
The many ways, this is similar to the DNA of the society.
So shaped over decades, sometimes centuries.
That is why there is no universal model for the digital transformation.
History teaches us one important lesson.
The most sustainable progress has always happened where the countries remained open to cooperation, to exchange of knowledge, to trade, technology, and new ideas.
Innovation seldom emerges in isolation.
It emerged in the intersection of the knowledge, cultures, and the experience.
It's about the creating platforms for collaboration, sharing the best practices, learning from one another, and the building trust between our countries.
Ultimately, the success of digital transformation is shaped by not only the technology available to the country.
It shaped by high how they already societies, and institutions evolved alongside them.
I think one of the most important thing before we met with some different countries and discuss how we try to implement technology, but technology, it's like the tools.
First of all, it's important to geopolitical structure, your vision to developing your country, your society, and the second, it's how you adopt the different challenges because today maybe artificial intelligence is so important question, but after five years, we may be gathering together and discuss about the quantum technology.
Yeah.
This is a tool and this is challenges I think we will have in the future, a lot of more than before.
But how our institutions and how our government to make this technology and implement to our society.
I think this is more important question.
I think.
Thank you.
Thank you, Minister.
Remaining open and flexible as the technology frontier is moving fast.
Thank you for those insights.
For the final word, I call on my sister Ahuna.
You've heard the ministers again, and you ended your previous intervention with this powerful note, capital is there, we have to unlock it.
How do we work to bring that innovative financing to bear on this very important area of digital transformation? Thank you.
I think one way is to look at it in a different context.
We're not building bridges and roads here.
It's not the same structure in terms of investing in infrastructure overall.
This is really a different ball game.
You need to reimagine allocation of resources, not in the big portfolio things of infrastructure.
I think it needs some engineering.
To understand what it's calling for an investment in DPI.
I think it's also important to have the question on governance is really an important one, having that commitment that's anchored at the highest political level, but at the same time has the whole of government, whole of society character.
We need to make sure that at the table are CSOs, our young people, women, the people who really, um, need to shape it, not just be beneficiaries of it.
That's part of the governance for me is governance architecture is making sure it's very inclusive.
I agree with Minister Mal that we need to see or at least make an effort for everyone to see the benefit for them.
Otherwise, because you're asking for change, cousal change and some of the people who have to Work towards that change will be affected one way or the other.
But the question is, how are they viewing, how they will be affected? There's a lot of work to be done on trust transparency and transitions, having that space for transitions.
Then I think capital has to be fit for purpose, like I was saying, and then communities have to shape it and collaboration has to be genuine and have that component of being a strategic autonomy.
I think it's really important here that countries autonomy is respected, the sovereignty is respected even as we expand the partnerships across borders.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Please join me in thanking our incredible panel.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, USG and before our honorable ministers depart, I think an official photograph will be taken before you take your leave.
Thank you once again for such an insightful panel.
I think please do come to the front here as I also explain how we are proceeding next.
We're going to the fun part of the day, which is a breakout.
We're going to have one session between now and lunch and then another after lunch.
As I wait for the sessions to be projected, I would encourage you get your cameras and take a picture of what I'm about to explain.
I know once lunch hits the system, we might forget how the second sessions go.
So I'm just waiting on this breakout slides present projection.
Thank you so much.
All right.
I know between people and lunch.
I know I'm the one before the session between us and lunch.
Once again, we're going into breakout sessions and there are going to be four of those available between now and lunch.
The first session that will be in Eso chamber is a DPR approach to next generation trade and transport.
The second one that will be in conference room A is on advancing population scale innovation with safe and inclusive DPI.
The third session in conference room 11 will be DPI Sustainability for Health, Learning and Science.
Last but not least in conference room nine, will be building inclusion, identity, payments, and the real cost of DPI.
I really do encourage you to take a picture of this as you're walking out to figure out which one you want to go to.
I'd like to mention that after lunch, Before we continue, let's do my favorite activity one more time.
Clap once if you can hear me.
Thank you.
Please give me 1 minute of your attention so I can explain how we're proceeding and you can take off.
Thank you very much.
As I mentioned, these are the breakout sessions that are about to take place.
Please take note of this because after lunch, we have another set of breakout sessions that will start at 3:00 P.M.
We're going to have in conference room nine, the Public Code Observatory on mapping Public Sector contributions to open source worldwide.
Conference room 11 will have Women Building Digital, the Govstk Women in Gov tech Challenge.
Conference room A will have DPI that delivers from failure points to multi stakeholder actions, and then the Echoc chamber will have making DPI work for children from country experience to implemented tactics.
For lunch, that will be on the fourth floor.
However, that is at your own cost, and we will gather again here at 4:00 P.M.
Thank you for your attention.
Enjoy the breakout sessions, I'll see you at 4:00 P.M.