The new government of Ukraine has set digitalization of the country and developing electronic government as one of its top proprieties, emphasizing on the urgent need for transparent and convenient services for citizens, businesses, and investors.
This won’t be an easy task.
Today Ukraine ranks 60th out of 63 countries in the digital competiveness ranking by the Swiss-based IMD center. Ukraine outran only Peru, Mongolia, and Venezuela.
In addition, Ukraine lost 20 positions in E-Government development index just in two years since 2016 and was ranked 82 in 2018, according to the United Nation survey.
On Dec.10, the aspects of Ukraine’s digital future will be a topic to discuss during the first panel at the Tiger Conference, an annual signature event organized by the Kyiv Post.
“The usage of public electronic services is still low because of weak confidence in the government and the online tools in general,” said Kateryna Onyiliogwu, open data team lead for the USAID and UKaid-funded Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services, known as TAPAS.
At the same time, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov – who will be among speakers at the conference – remains optimistic about improving electronic democracy through digital transformation.
The transparency provided within the digital services, in his view, will help Ukraine to fight corruption and create an easy dialogue between citizens and the state.
“People will stop noticing the government,” Fedorov told the Kyiv Post. “They’ll be using it like they use Uber or Booking.com — only when they need it. Government will become a service.”
Florian Marcus, analyst at the e-Estonia Briefing Centre, also sure that if technologies are implemented with the proper security and privacy safeguards, the “state in a smartphone”, which Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has promised as a great expansion of e-government, is truly possible.
“Estonia has made 99% of its government services accessible online and so can Ukraine,” Marcus said.
According to him, Ukraine has already taken needed steps, introducing electronic ID-cards and using a data exchange system called Trembita to make the communication within the governmental bodies more secure.
“From this point onwards, you will need determination to fully digitalize the government services, ministry by ministry, office by office,” Marcus said.
This will include investing money into infrastructure and education on how to use computers, online tools and have a cyber hygiene – a set of practices to improve online security. Very often the human is the weakest link in the area of cybersecurity, the expert said.
As an example of Ukraine’s success in digitalization, Onyiliogwu from TAPAS mentioned the introduction of the electronic ticket for public transport is the city of Zhytomyr, a city 130 kilometers west of Kyiv. It has become more convenient for locals and helped manage passenger flows, as the system analyzes the data generated by e-ticket.
But for her, there can’t be a single correct plan turning a country digital, and Ukraine should go its own way, as the problems of citizens in the European Union differ from the problems of Ukrainians.
“Human needs are the basis of any digital decisions,” Onyiliogwu said, adding that infrastructure, education, and medicine are priority areas for digitization in Ukraine. “This is something that worries Ukrainians the most.”
