GovTech: Putting People First

For the program period July 2020- June 2021, the GTGP particularly supports the following strategic themes

• Supporting COVID-19 Response and Recovery: The Covid19 response has posed significant challenges and provided opportunities to implement GovTech solutions for resilience, business continuity, service delivery, and citizen engagement and awareness raising. Countries around the world have sped up innovation and development of GovTech tools and solutions to manage response, continue to provide necessary administrative services, push critical alerts and information as well as engage with citizens to answer questions and understand concerns, and other.
• Organizing for Effective Digital Government: This theme will support work aimed at promoting well-coordinated digital governments including promoting the whole-of-Government GovTech approach, and targeted GovTech skills development for Government officials. As countries transition to more integrated and seamless whole-of- government digitization approaches, there is a need for assistance, particularly around clear institutional roles and responsibilities to manage reforms, as well as shared services to realize economies of scale and reduce redundancies in investments.
• Government Service Delivery and Citizen Engagement: Work under this theme may include efforts and GovTech solutions that employ user-centric service design principles, and target GovTech enabled citizen engagement and participation. Client countries remain focused on improving access, quality and efficiency of administrative services through digitalization with a view to making government services user-centric.
• Data Platforms and Governance: This theme will focus on work that helps develop robust data platforms and support responsible data governance and data management. The growth of technology and resulting data collection from governments highlight the need for robust data protection. Governments collect and generate a tremendous amount of data that can be used to support evidence-based policymaking and planning, creation of value-added services, and support accountability through third party monitoring. However, these opportunities also come with risk. Regulations on data governance, management and use are required to ensure proper safeguards.
• Special Theme: Universal Accessibility: Under IDA19, the World Bank has committed to supporting 12 countries over the next three years to implement universally accessible GovTech solutions. Universally accessible GovTech services (which includes the modality and content of services) requires that services are designed in a manner that can be accessed, understood and used by all persons regardless of disability, age, use of assistive devices, location or internet access. It applies to hardware (e.g. electronic kiosks, touch screen interfaces) and software components (e.g. websites, electronic documents, forms, e-portals, multimedia). This theme will focus on work that helps ensure people with disabilities have access to and are able to use GovTech solutions.