Keynote Address by Minister Josephine Teo at the Nus Computing for Voluntary Welfare Organisations (CVWO) 20th Anniversary Celebration on 11 September 2026

Professor Tulika,

Professor Ben Leong

My former Parliamentary Colleagues, Mr Keith Chua and Mr Daniel Goh

Friends, Colleagues

1. I believe in the mission of CVWO and the value of the CCSGP. In the course of my work, I'm very often asked by other policymakers how we think about digital governance in Singapore.

2. It starts with finding the purpose of your governance. The ‘how’ of governance always depends on the ‘why’.

3. Before I explain our strategies to my policymaker colleagues internationally, I always bring them back to what our governance approaches seek to achieve. I tell them that to keep a country going, you must think about growth and creating opportunities for your people.

4. Secondly, we have to think about how we preserve trust in society. We have to look at the risks that technologies bring to individuals, such as when children, youths, and even adults suffer from online harms.

5. Technologies can result in the erosion of trust in other ways, such as through misinformation, or if digital systems consistently fail. If you don't even know whether you can pay with your e-wallet, and still must carry some cash because the system might fail at the point of payment, then there is not enough trust in the technology. This is not a very sustainable way to embrace technology and hope that it does good.

6. So, that is the second thing we must do: preserve trust.

7. The third, which is just as important and very often neglected, is something that doesn’t always rank very highly when I speak with my policymaker colleagues: How do we, through technology, strengthen a sense of community?

8. Technology has a perverse consequence for many of us. It allows you to keep in touch with people from far-flung lands. You get to know people with shared interests who are not in your physical orbit, but you may not have a very good relationship with your neighbour. You may not even know your neighbour or pause to say hello.

9. So, the potential for technology to bring us closer together is matched by its potential to keep us apart. Therefore, how you preserve a sense of community, even as we embrace technology, is something that we keep in mind.

10. So, if you keep these three governance goals in mind, it makes all of the ‘hows’, much easier. The ‘hows’ are actually not so earth-shattering; they are not so surprising.

11. Firstly, you need good infrastructure. If you have no good infrastructure, there's nothing to talk about.

12. Mr. Tan was previously in StarHub, and if you don't have a well-functioning mobile network or a reliable broadband network, then digital access is going to be much more constrained or costly.

13. So, infrastructure, as a digital governance strategy, is essential. The question is how determined and how organised you are in implementation.

14. The second part of our digital governance strategy is capabilities. Capabilities in the workforce, and capabilities amongst organisations, primarily enterprises, because most of the time we acquire our capabilities as members of organisations.

15. We learn very naturally because the organisation expects us to pick up these skills. As a result, our workforce and enterprise capabilities very often go hand in hand. I always tell my colleagues that governance capabilities are equally important.

16. No one really knows how to govern the digital domain. It is not like when Singapore was building up our rail infrastructure, or developing housing policy.

17. When we were thinking about building safety, someone had a standard, someone had done it before, and we could say, let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's understand their philosophy and how they implemented it, and the pros and cons of various methods. Then, let's do it for ourselves.

18. Governance capabilities in the digital domain, however, suffer from this gaping hoThere are not that many playbooks elsewhere in the world that you can either copy or adapt to our own circumstances. You're almost always having to start from scratch and think about the right way to approach it.

19. So, capabilities as a second piece of our digital governance not difficult to articulate, although more difficult to.

20. The third part, of course, is that must think about introducing new rules, laws regulations. Again – a domain there are no easy answers.

21. For example, we just introduced a Digital Infrastructure Bill. What goes into the good governance of digital infrastructure is also not a question that many countries already have good answers to, so we have to look around and design our own.

22. In June this year, we set up an Online Safety Commission, made possible because in November last year, we passed a new law on Online Safety Relief and Accountability to deal with harms to individuals when they go online, not just harms to society. For that, we had previous legislations.

23. If you look around the world, there is only one other country that has a similar setup to the Online Safety Commission. That's the Australian eSafety Commission, but the Australian eSafety Commission does not have a law to back up its commission in thesame way as we do. So it's novel, and therefore, our capability in introducing new rules around digital governance, is also something that we have to acquire over time.

24. The fourth important strategy in digital governance is international cooperation. Many of the standards that we introduce will be difficult for companies to cope with if there are different rules on data or standards at each border.

25. The Digital Infrastructure Bill is a very good case in point. It sets standards for energy efficiency when you operate a data centre in Singapore. If you are a data centre operator, you have to deal with Singapore's regulations and requirements, but also those everywhere else you operate.

26. So, is there some way in which we can persuade our international colleagues to adopt the same standard? That's what I spend a considerable amount of time doing: persuading my international counterparts to think about these kinds of rules and offering them a model they can reference, if they are ready to move ahead.

27. The fifth, and most underrated part, is how you rally the whole of society. This thought became very prominent in my mind, a few months into my role at the former Ministry of Communications and Information.

28. It became very clear to me that the nature of our work was far-reaching. The questions that we were confounded with had so few answers, and the risks of not doing enough were so great that unless we thought seriously about partners and organised ourselves to rally the whole of society, we would not get as far as we hoped.

29. Today, when you look at our landscape, it's no longer difficult to find organisations and ground-up movements regularly organising hackathons, not to solve their companies' problems, but to solve community problems.

30. Open Government Products (OGP), organises a Hack for Public Good, supporting community organisations. We give participants training, similar to CCSGP, to equip them with the right skills to identify, write problem statements, and deploy their skills to address meaningful community issues.

31. This gives us a sense of the good that can be achieved when young people have the help of mentors and institutions that are prepared to provide resources and the encouragement. If you harness this energy, there is so much more that can be done in our society well beyond the Government's scope of digital services.

32. If we depended only on GovTech or OGP, we would only go so far and it would be a long time before we could reach all your client organisations. It would be quite impossible to resolve some of the community problems that deserve attention, but would not be prioritised very highly at the outset. So, I want to thank all the people who have worked hard to make CVWO and CCSGP a reality.

33. I also want to acknowledge your good work as pathfinders and trailblazers. You were already doing this well before many others in society, applying new skills and abilities in the technology domain to benefit fellow citizens and bring society along as we become a digitally advanced society.

34. I want to also thank Mr Keith Chua, as trustee of the Mrs Lee Choon Guan Trust Fund. Mrs Lee was herself a remarkable woman. There is a real confluence of interests here, because she found a way to use the resources at her disposal to benefit society during her time. You are continuing her legacy and helping to empower a whole new generation of youth in Singapore with the ability and right intentions to make a difference to this and future generations.

35. Thank you very much once again for inviting me, and congratulations on another 20 years for CVWO.