Future of Government Awards 2024
The Future of Government Awards champions practitioners, teams and leaders who are improving people’s lives by applying digital solutions and leveraging technology to transform the public sector for those it serves.
Categories
Digital team of the year
Public sector teams work tirelessly and very often it is challenging to create and sustain meaningful, impactful change in their sector. The teams who successfully navigate skills gaps, insufficient funding, changing policies – and even resistance – in order to improve people’s lives are not acknowledged often enough.
Who can enter?
This award recognises a small team that has achieved the greatest impact over the last 2 years by championing digital transformation.
Open source creation
Buying off-the-shelf solutions plays an important part in transforming and improving public services. However, the Open source creation award celebrates the innovators, developers, and leaders in government who are designing and building their own solutions and – crucially – making them available for others to adapt and re-use.
Who can enter?
This award recognises an open source solution that has been created and has demonstrable potential for reuse by other governments.
Open source reuse
Open source reuse is when a creation that was designed, built, written and then shared by one team, is reconfigured or adapted by another team so it can be used in a different context. We want to celebrate those in the public sector who are building on shared knowledge because working in this way leads to less duplication of time, effort and money, and allows quicker delivery and scaling.
Who can enter?
This award recognises a team that has demonstrated the value of reusing existing, proven solutions rather than choosing to recreate them. Nomination-worthy examples could be software, data, models or standards.
Leadership award
Teams can only make a meaningful and lasting difference for people if the conditions for success exist within the environment they are working in. The most impactful leaders in the tech and digital space are those that create and protect that environment so that teams can explore, fail, learn then iterate. They unblock challenges and remove distraction so that their teams can focus on delivering value to people.
Who can enter?
This award recognises a leader who has enabled their team, or organisation, to make a significant difference to people’s lives.
Lifetime achievement award
There are many digital heroes in the public sector but this award recognises the sustained and impactful contribution from an outstanding individual. The winner will be someone who has leveraged technology to improve many people's lives over a number of years. They will be responsible for a legacy of positive change.
Who can enter?
The lifetime achievement award is not open for nominations and will be chosen by the Selection Committee.
Key dates
Nominations open
Nominations close
Shortlists announced
Awards ceremony
Selection Committee
Calum Handforth
Senior Advisor, Digital and Tech Transformation, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Tamara Srzentic
Former Minister of Public Administration, Digital Society and Media, Government of Montenegro
2023-24 Past winners
Digital Advocates of the year
Digital Identity Directorate Team, Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services of the Federal Government of Brazil - Brasília, Brazil
The Digital Identity Directorate team implemented the GOV.BR Digital Identity which has revolutionised citizens' relationship with the public sector. The service is secure and interoperable, and, since it was released in 2019, it has become indispensable. It now has 155 million users. It performs 3 billion authentications every month enabling secure access to 4,500 digital services from over 1,000 public agencies.
Open source creation
Bahmni, Thoughtworks - Bangalore, India
Bahmni is an integrated digital health solution. It connects a range of existing systems such as those managing non-communicable diseases, reproductive and child health, teleconsultation, and inventory management. Bahmni is designed to improve the quality of patient care in settings with limited bandwidth and infrastructure. Today, Bahmni supports millions of patients across more than 50 countries.
Open source adaptation
PhilSys: Philippines Statistics Authority - Quezon City, Philippines
The Philippine Identification System, better known as ‘Philsys’, is an adaptation of an open source solution called ‘MOSIP’. The Philippines has over 110 million citizens who are spread across thousands of islands, making centralised registration very difficult. The PhilSys team worked with MOSIP and a range of partners to build special field kits that let enrollment officers travel door-to-door to collect people’s information. The team also worked with MOSIP to make the identity credential a digitally signed QR code so it could be verified offline. Today, 79 million people are now registered with PhilSys.
Leadership award
Mr. Abhishek Singh, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India - New Delhi, India
Mr Abhishek Singh is President and CEO of National E-Governance Division (NeGD), Managing Director and CEO of Digital India Corporation, and CEO of Karmayogi Bharat. It is due to his leadership that much of India's digital public infrastructure is thriving. This includes DIKSHA (digital infrastructure for national school education); Karmayogi Bharat (governance reforms through upskilling and lifelong learning of government officials); CoWIN (digital platform which facilitated the vaccination of 1 billion people against Covid); and DigiLocker (digital wallet enabling the sharing of 6 billion electronic documents).
Lifetime achievement award
Jennifer Pahlka, USA
Jennifer Pahlka has been an innovator, a champion, and a catalyst in making government work for the digital age for over 2 decades. She is a phenomenal, empathetic and energetic leader.
Career highlights include founding Code for America in 2010 (and in doing so, creating a new model for how civic minded technologists can partner with government); being appointed President Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer, as well as helping to set up the US Digital Service. Her work has inspired thousands and has attracted countless digital leaders and practitioners to public service. Her book, Recoding America, dares us to be bolder and fundamentally rethink how government can work to service citizens.
2022 Past winners
Digital innovatorof the year
Mykhailo Fedorov
In Ukraine, the Ministry of Digital Transformation was established in 2019 and Mykhailo Fedorov was appointed minister to lead the digital transformation of the country. He is also the youngest minister in the political history of Ukraine. His immediate priority was to create the "State in the smartphone" - so people could communicate directly with the state via their smartphones.
Open source creationof the year
IO, the app for Italian public services
Italy's bureaucracy often requires people to navigate through dozens of platforms in order to access public services or manage their obligations to the State. The app IO was launched in early 2020 by PagoPA to overturn this paradigm by putting simple and user-centred public services into the citizens' pockets.
Open source adaptationof the year
Cambodia Data Exchange (CamDX)
CamDX stands for Cambodia Data Exchange, which adopts the model of X-Road of Estonia. CamDX is a unified yet decentralised data exchange layer between information systems that offers a standardised and secure way to provide and consume services. CamDX ensures confidentiality, integrity, and interoperability between a multitude of different data exchange parties. The main goal of CamDX is to build an infrastructure that allows for establishing effortless access to data in government databases (public services) without compromising the security and ownership of the data and with minimal technical changes in the existing information systems.
Sponsors
UNDP is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. Working with our broad network of experts and partners in 170 countries, we want to create a world in which digital is an empowering force for people and planet - and ensure that digital leaves no one behind. The Future of Government Awards are an important platform to showcase and celebrate digital excellence. They can provide countries around the world with the inspiration, knowledge, and tools to accelerate their digital development - and to reimagine development in a digital age.
Public Digital is a digital transformation consultancy which was founded by the leaders who created the UK’s Government Digital Service – the organisation that transformed how public services were delivered to citizens. Now, we help large organisations doing meaningful work transform how they operate in the internet era so their services are more responsive to user needs, easier to use and more equitable to access. So far, we’ve worked with governments from 35 countries across 5 continents.
The Future of Government Awards is an opportunity to look sideways to celebrate peers and to build and strengthen public sector communities that can lean on – and learn from – each other.The AWS Institute helps digital transformation leaders in governments and other public organizations around the world reshape and modernize public services through the cloud. The AWS Institute produces thought leadership content, offers a global executive education program, and maintains a global, invitational network of public sector leaders. With the Future of Government Awards, we hope to help highlight the extraordinary efforts of those who are shaping and accelerating government modernisation around the world.
