DPGA welcomes eGov Foundation as a new member

Today we’re announcing eGov Foundation as the newest member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance. eGov is a mission-driven non-profit fueled by the belief that every person should be able to access services from their government with ease, security, and transparency. 

The eGov Foundation builds DPGs and DPI for governance and development impact, works with policy stakeholders to create an enabling public policy environment, and engages with stakeholders across industry, academia and civil society to ensure these DPGs and DPI are effectively leveraged to drive development outcomes. Their work shows that achieving the SDGs at scale across the Global South requires the acceleration and simplification that a combination of digital and non-digital public goods can provide.

eGov Foundation’s work on DPGs:

1. DIGIT: This year, the eGov Foundation entered into a partnership with India’s Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs and the National Institute of Urban Affairs to support India’s National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM), launched in February 2021. eGov’s DIGIT platform for urban governance and service delivery, a DPG for citizen-centric governance, will form the basis of the National Urban Governance Platform, which will be offered to state governments under NUDM. DIGIT is already being used in the States of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, and Uttarakhand, as well as in Cantonment Boards across the country.

Impact snapshot for DIGIT -> eGov’s software / solutions live in more than 800 urban local bodies, representing approximately 20% of all urban local governments in India. -> 3.6 million citizens are registered on the DIGIT platform. -> 100,000 local government employees have been trained.  -> 2.4 million service requests have been addressed, with average time to provide the service brought down by 64% (2016-21). -> 1.3 million grievances have been resolved, with a 34% reduction in the time taken for completion over a 5-year period (2016-21). -> 10-fold increase in payments made by citizens between 2016-21, contributing to both ease of transaction and revenue self-sustainability.

2. DISHHA: eGov Foundation has also started building a DPI for sanitation (DISHHA), with the first step being creating a DPG for fecal sludge management (FSM). This DPG is being piloted in the State of Odisha, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the initial proof of concept. This work connects sanitation-focused partners with global expertise to ensure that the platform is context-neutral and can be adapted for use cases globally.

3. iFIX: eGov Foundation has started to design and build a platform (iFIX) to improve fund and information flows for public financial management. Given that robust budgeting processes (from planning and forecasting to budget execution and audit) tend to be crucial to driving development impact in LMIC development programs, a DPG/DPI for public financial management presents a significant opportunity to ensure that development programs are able to request budget allocations, ensure just-in-time availability of funds, and execute programs in a timely manner. As a first step to understand and improve information flows, a mobile application that digitises frontline fund flows is currently being piloted in the state of Punjab.

4. DIVOC: DIVOC, an initiative of eGov Foundation and a DPG, is an open-source digital platform for large-scale digital vaccination, verifiable credentials, and public health programs, built for scale in India, and addresses other future vaccination scenarios, digital credentialing, and beyond. It has already been used to generate over 1 billion secure and verifiable vaccination test certificates for COVID-19 in India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. The eGov Foundation is supporting governments in Jamaica and Indonesia to roll out COVID-19 vaccine certificates using DIVOC.

The DPGA is excited to work with the eGov Foundation on these and other initiatives over the coming year. To learn more about eGov’s work visit their website or the DPGA Roadmap.