News: The Future of Government Awards 2025

The Future of Government Awards recently took took place online with Public Digital collaborating with UNDP and Amazon Web Services for the second year in a row to organise the event. The awards are aimed at celebrating brilliant people around the world who are doing meaningful work across the public sector in the digital space. 

This year, I co-hosted the ceremony alongside Michael Downey, an open source analyst at UNDP. You can watch the hour-long ceremony on our YouTube channel (see below), or read the highlights here. We’ve published the highly commended nominees and shortlists on the FoG website.

The major theme that shone through was the importance of collaboration in its various forms: from open standards and sharing, to working together through transparent and equitable partnerships. 

In her keynote address, Salima Bah, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Communication, Technology and Innovation, urged governments to capitalise on each other’s successes. She acknowledged the unique position of public servants in contrast to those in the private sector: “The future of government is not about competition but about collaboration,” she said. The difference being that “every breakthrough in digital public service is a victory for us all.”

Meaningful transformation, Madam Bah said, is “not the number of systems we deploy but [whether they are] truly responsive to citizens’ needs.” With this in mind, the winner of the Digital team of the year award exemplifies true digital transformation.

Digital team of the year: Kyiv Digital, Ukraine

When the war began, it was critical that the Kyiv Digital team responded rapidly to the needs of the capital's residents. 

“Some of the new services they built were aimed at survival,” said Victoria Itskovych, CEO of Kyiv City Council, when she accepted the award. 

The team built on the existing infrastructure of the Kyiv Digital smart city app and were able to quickly increase its functionality so it offered real-time updates, emergency alerts, and vital services to support and protect more than 3.3 million residents.

One of the many vital services offered through the app helps people find air raid shelters. Maps are available offline and the service works with low internet connectivity, which, as Madam Bah mentioned, is an example of “digital innovation [that is] not leaving anyone behind.”

It’s an outcome the open source reuse award winner is also succeeding at.

Open source reuse winner: Financiera para el Bienestar integration of Mifos X, Mexico

Since integrating Mifos X, (an open source platform providing tools for financial inclusion) Mexico’s Créditos para el Bienestar (‘Credits for wellbeing’) programme has closed digital and financial gaps. Now the Mexican government can now offer a fully digitised, self-service lending process to the poorest, unbanked people in Mexico through a robust system. Two factors contribute to the programme’s success:

1. Transparency within the lending service itself – an electronic loan account folder is viewable across more than 1,700 Mexican bank branches and lessens the likelihood of corruption (previously a big blocker to financial aid).

2. Collaboration which underpins Mifos Initiative’s dedication to “harnessing the power of its global community” so it can meet its vision: to reach 2 billion unbanked people.

From accessible funds to another crucial pillar of societal stability: accessible healthcare.

Open Source Creation winner: DHIS2, Norway

DHIS2 is a free, open-source platform for collecting, managing, analysing, visualising and sharing data. It brings together a wide variety of data from many sources to support decision- making. At the moment, over 100 countries are using it to transform their health information management systems so better healthcare and information can be provided more proactively.

In his acceptance speech, Max Krafft (Communications Lead for the DHIS2 core team), attributed DHSI2’s success to being codesigned. He thanked the global health information service provider (HISP) network (people who provide implementation support) for being the link between the users and the software team. The feedback has helped shape the platform so it is easily customisable, has a low barrier to adoption and can add more value to more people more quickly.

Throughout the ceremony, there was a recognition that no one body can make meaningful and lasting change. The sentiment was echoed by our Lifetime Achievement award winner.

Lifetime Achievement award: Nandan Nilekani, India

In 2009, India’s then prime minister Manmohan Singh asked wildly successful technology entrepreneur, Nandan Nilekani, to resolve the issues of identity for India. At the time, the country had a population of more than 1.2 billion.

Unsurprisingly, a programme of this size had many challenges: “Convincing a billion people is not easy,” he says. Nandan talked about the relationships he fostered within government departments so they could collaborate rather than step on each other's toes.

Under Nandan Nilekani’s leadership, 600 million unique IDs had been rolled out by 2014, as part of the Aadhaar programme.

His design and delivery priorities:

1. Design for scale and speed – this helps with momentum. Aadhaar favoured a “simple, minimalistic design” and offered an enrollment incentive.

2. Make it available to all – think through the architecture and ask how we might contribute to the digital public infrastructure. The Indian ID system can be used for other purposes in both the public and the private sector. For example, opening a bank account.

3. Protect national sovereignty – governments should retain their source code and “be in charge of their destiny” so they are not locked in with a vendor or dependent on anybody.

You can watch Liam Maxwell, Director of Government Transformation at Amazon Web Services, interview Nandan and present him with his award (from 21 minutes and 40 seconds). 

Nandan Nilekani’s success in the private sector meant he brought different and desirable skills into government. The winner of the Leadership award is also at the intersection of the two sectors; recognises their differences, and knows how invaluable it is to build teams around diverse skillsets.

Leadership award winner: Christina Lang, Germany

The final award of the ceremony celebrated Christina Lang, who founded a tech start-up in 2019 to encourage private sector digital talent into government. It later became DigitalService, the central digitisation unit of the German federal government.

Against the odds, many of the digital experts now working for DigitalService left global technology firms and consultancies in favour of designing and building digital public services. Under Christina’s leadership, there’s a progressive and open company culture reminiscent of the private sector. Minimum viable products launch within months, followed by quick release cycles, often once per month. DigitalService is a super example of people with diverse skills collaborating to deliver value while maintaining momentum.

It’s good to be reminded that the public sector has many allies who have access to different levers and can offer support and partnerships.

Madam Bah spoke about collaboration between the public and private sector, emphasising that to drive innovation, infrastructure expansion and service delivery at scale, strong public-private partnerships are essential. “These collaborations ensure that our digital future is not just government-led, but co-created with industry leaders, communities, and innovators worldwide.”

She closed her keynote with a rallying cry for collaboration: “The future of government is digital, the future of digital is open, and the future of all of us is stronger together.”

Let’s keep this in mind.