Ukraine’s digital ID app Diia continues to attract attention

In June, Ukraine became the first country to offer online marriage ceremonies, allowing Roman Lozynskyi and his fiancée Svitlana Kisilova to tie the knot using the country’s digital identity app Diia.

The marriage between the Ukraine parliament member Lozynskyi and university lecturer Kisilova was validated with digital signatures on Diia, which allows Ukrainians to access documents such as ID cards, biometric passports and driver’s licenses. The app also gives individuals and businesses access to public services, with the main goal of bringing all public services online.

Ukraine’s digital transformation through Diia is important not only for more than 30,000 couples who have registered for online marriage since the service was launched. The world is paying close attention to Ukraine and how it’s leveraging its digital ID and its digital public infrastructure (DPI) to boost its economy while defending itself from Russia’s invasion.

Digital infrastructure payoffs revealed in the time of crisis

The threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty has revealed the essential role of e-government and digital infrastructure for boosting not just efficiency but also national resilience, writes the Brookings Institution. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank analyzes the technical solutions that contributed to the country’s success in digitalization. This includes Diia, e-procurement service Prozorro and Trembita, an interoperable, decentralized government data exchange platform based on Estonia’s open-source ecosystem X-Road.

Diia is the most significant innovation introduced by the Ukrainian government, according to Brookings. With the foundational pieces of Trembita and Diia, Ukraine was able to swiftly expand Diia to address wartime needs, including launching services for internally displaced persons (IDPs), financial assistance, property damage registration and compensation, reporting Russian troops’ coordinates, buying war bonds and more. The latest innovation introduced is digital veteran cards.

While digital transformation can take decades, the payoff to government operations and citizen resilience can be “extraordinary even in the hardest of times,” the report concludes. Brookings also highlights Ukraine’s collaboration with Estonia as an example of how leveraging open-source solutions can speed up digitalization.

Brookings estimated Diia’s economic and anti-corruption to be US$455 million in 2021 and US$1.34 billion in 2022. The app has become a starting point for a broader digital ecosystem of Diia-linked applications. The country made Diaa open-source in March this year.

Making government registries resilient

Ukraine also serves as an example of how digital public infrastructure can make government registries resilient against crises like war, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), another Washington think tank. The report emphasizes the differences between DPI cases in countries of the Global South, including India, Brazil and Zambia.

To protect itself from both physical attacks and cyberattacks, the Diia platform does not store data directly. Instead, it accesses information from decentralized databases with the help of Trembita and the Vulyk automation system.

“With over 100 dispersed government registries and databases, Ukraine’s data storage system is less vulnerable to external attacks than centralized systems such as the India Stack,” CSIS notes.

Ukraine digitized nearly all of its government registries between 2016 and 2020, Trembita was launched to ensure the secure exchange of data between users and state databases alongside Vulyk, which stores digital records from roughly 600 administrative service centers. Trembita also paved the way for Diia’s launch in 2020 by standardizing data formatting and data sharing,  according to the case study.

A portal to education

Digitalization is not just giving Ukraine an advantage on the battlefield but also in the classrooms. A report from UK higher education-focused outlet Wonghe analyzes Ukraine’s efforts to educate and reskill its population to boost its digital economy.

A part of these efforts is Diia.Osvita, a digital education web portal providing distance learning as part of the Diia.Digital Education project. Last year, Ukraine also launched an app called Mriia for Ukrainian schoolchildren, their parents and teachers. The app provides a digital ID for children alongside information about educational programs, courses, videos, extracurricular activities, competitions and clubs.

According to data from the Ukrainian government, the Diia portal has more than 21.7 million users with over 70 government services available online. The Diia app holds 14 digital documents (ID card, foreign biometric passport, student card, driver’s license, vehicle registration certificate, vehicle insurance policy, tax number, birth certificate, IDP certificate) and 21 services.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital government  |  digital ID  |  digital public infrastructure  |  Diia  |  mobile app  |  Ukraine