As the World Wide Web celebrates its 30th birthday this year, much has been made about the risks of the connected world. At Future State, we are committed to building resources and knowledge to support policymakers who aspire to foster inclusive and competitive digital economies in which personal data is a driver of innovation in public service delivery and individual empowerment.

That’s why we were proud to partner with Smart Africa, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, to conduct our inaugural Digital Transformation Master Class, which brought together policymaker cohorts from Rwanda, Ghana, Kenya, Djibouti and Gabon in March to begin to tackle these challenges governments have in implementing digital transformation programs. The 4-day course introduced Future State’s PACT Framework, which offers a values-based lens as an anchor for digital policymaking by focusing on an Individual’s Participation, Agency, Choice, and Trust in the digital ecosystem. The course explored in depth the experiences of India and Estonia in investing in the platforms and policies that have bestowed their citizens with new rights and capabilities.

Despite the great energy around these types of observations and ideas throughout the week, participants universally acknowledged the challenges in translating them into sustained action within their governments. Our partners identified immediate and specific opportunities to support them in creating ambitious but achievable plans for implementing these types of observations and early ideas:

  1. Creating tools to help ask policymakers the right questions.
  2. Developing infrastructure for dynamic, ongoing peer learning.
  3. Building whole-of-government coalitions for digital transformation.

We believe deeply that there is an opportunity to build a collaborative network of expert-practitioners “Digital Leaders” around the world anchored in a shared vision of a digital future that works for people by mitigating the inherent risks of digitization and maximizing the potential to drive inclusive growth and empower individuals.

Read the full article about policymakers and technology by Kay McGowan and Jonathan Dolan at The Rockefeller Foundation.