Is GovTech The Answer to Governments’ Problems?
Imagine governments across the continent immediately responding to drought and landslide damage, covering a pothole, collecting garbage or answering a terrorist attack as seamless & swift as ordering an Uber or having your meal delivered on Jumia Food or Uber Eats? Wouldn’t that be hella cool?
Governments across the globe are increasingly adopting technology to increase efficiency in service delivery to their citizenry, a collective idea that has been termed as ‘Govtech’. Over the past few years, there has been an immense growth in the number of senior level positions within governments focused on bringing technology, data, and innovation into governance which has seen increased spending on IT by governments.
Across the globe, governments play a major role in organizing and delivering services that citizens can’t handle and in the past years, they’ve introduced a number of trends such as adoption of the cloud, an open data movement to promote openness within Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and they’ve embraced new technologies in a bid to break the ‘red tape’ that is typical of governments.
Govtech Fund, a venture capital fund dedicated to government technology startups defines ‘GovTech’ as the technology infrastructure that government MDAs, use to do their internal work or deliver services to their “customers” who in this case are the citizens. To simplify it further, they term it as the “operating system” of government — the infrastructure and tools government agencies use every day to do their jobs.
Governments have been increasingly pressured by taxpayers and the citizenry at large to improve service delivery every day that passes by and they’ve since resolved to adopt and hop onto the digitization wave in a bid to tap on strong technology-forward policies within their administrations.
With the rapid advancement in technology infrastructure such as smartphones become smarter, self-driving cars, the emergence of everything the 4th industrial revolution has to offer…
