Minister Josephine Teo’s comments on the Unlocking Potential: Digital Cooperation for DPI panel

Transcript of Mrs Josephine Teo’s, Minister for Digital Development and Information, comments on the “Unlocking Potential: Digital Cooperation for DPI” panel at the Digital Public Goods Alliance’s 50-in-5 Milestone Event in New York City, 24 September 2024

Panellists:

• Moses Kunkuyu Kalongaswawa, Minister of Information and Digitalization, Malawi

• Josephine Teo, Minister for Digital Development and Information, Singapore

• Margus Tsahkna, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Estonia

• Cina Lawson, Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation, Togo

Moderator:

• Liv Marte Kristiansen Nordhaug, CEO, Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat

Moderator: Digital cooperation is really at the heart of this campaign. So, I would like to invite all you to share some perspectives on what digital cooperation for Digital Public Infrastructure means in your respective country’s settings. And I wanted to start with you, Minister Teo. I am very interested in hearing your remarks from Singapore.

Minister Teo: Thank you very much, and we feel very honoured to be part of this very important and meaningful initiative. Perhaps I'll organise my remarks along three lines.

Firstly, I wanted to share our takeaways and lessons learned when it comes to digital inclusion. Singapore, as you know, is a very small island, so compared to some of the challenges that our colleagues face in terms of wiring up the country to achieve digital connectivity, we have had a relatively easy time. We don't have Indonesia's 17,000 islands, nor Brazil's 8.5 million square kilometres.

However, we discovered that digital inclusion goes beyond just making sure that 99.9% of households can get onto the Internet; there is also the difficulty with devices. If people can’t get up-to-date devices, then they are left behind, because the idea of inequality exists not only in the absolute sense, but also in the relative sense. Even if you had access to the devices, if you don't have the skills or confidence to use them, then you have another problem.

There is yet another layer of inequality, or digital divide, which exists in the ability to transact digitally. And that leads us to a very important part - in terms of government digital services. Why do we think this is important? There are three reasons.

The first is because when the government chooses to deliver some of its public services digitally, citizens are in some way forced to learn how to conduct the transactions. But if the government is thoughtful about how we design the delivery of these digital services, in fact, it could be a way to help everybody come on board.

The other very important reason for why governments should pay attention to the delivery of digital government services is that we do need to be able to get enough experience and expertise to govern effectively in this space. So, unless we have been involved in the delivery of government digital services, then there is a gap in our knowledge and understanding.

The next and very important reason is that unless the government steps in, the landscape will become very fragmented, where interoperability is not achievable. So, for example, if every organisation has its own digital identity system, imagine the poor citizen having to re-enroll each time just to establish who he is online. Or what if there are many different payment systems that are not interoperable? This is why government actions in trying to bring together some coherence is important.

I also want to touch on digital public infrastructure. We found that in terms of contributing to capacity building, it is not only meaningful, but also a very important for us to continue to learn from colleagues around the world the challenges they face. In learning together, we have a better chance of making progress together. One of the ways in which we have done so is through the Forum of Small States, of which we are the convener. On its 30th anniversary, we decided that we should introduce a digital pillar, and capacity programmes have now been introduced. These programmes take place annually and exist at the executive- and fellowship levels. And through this process, we have been able to bring together colleagues from around the world to try and make progress together.

There is one other way that Singapore hopes to be able to contribute to joint progress. The idea is that since we have already invested the resources to build up some tools for digital government services, we should be able to share it in a way that enables our colleagues to also adopt these same tools in a low code or no code manner, which does not require them to reinvent or put aside so many resources. The number of things that we have on our plates is just so much that the more we are able to be efficient in sharing, the better we will be as a collective. So, we are very happy to take part in the Digital Public Goods Alliance. The whole philosophy of using technology for good is something that we subscribe to, and in terms of the 50-in-5, we are very happy to contribute specific tools that are low code in nature.

One example is for the purposes of government creating forms (FormSG¹), because all governments use forms to collect data and ask people to submit information. The other example is the government, in terms of sharing information with citizens, always must build websites (Isomer²). And we found that even within the Singapore government previously, departments spent enormous amounts of money just to build a simple website, so we found a way of doing so that is much more cost effective and enables the government to stand up websites as and when the need arises.

So, we hope that by contributing these tools, we will benefit our colleagues and that we can continue to learn together. Thank you.

¹More info on FormSG here: FormSG

²More info on Isomer here: Isomer