The digital revolution is creating unprecedented opportunities and challenges for economic development. How did countries respond? What roles did the governments, enterprises and civil societies play in energizing and governing the digital transformation process? What kinds of processes and interactions between the country and aid agencies can lead to broad local ownership, empowerment, inclusion, and agile implementation. My published book (Driving Digital Transformation in Developing Nations: Case studies**) seeks to understand and answer these critical questions.
As I shared in a recent blog on a companion book (Economic Development in the Digital Age), I take a holistic view of digital transformation. A digital transformation ecosystem includes enabling digital policies and regulations, national information and communication infrastructures, ICT services sector capabilities, data sharing infrastructure, digital competencies, public digital platforms, digital identification infrastructure, digital payment platforms, digital innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems, and the interactions with the transforming (analog) economy.
In this book I share my experience in assisting countries, cities and regions to digitally transform. I focus on two in-depth case studies where Bank assistance was influential. In India, back in 1990, the Bank financed a study of its software export strategy when the industry was still in its infancy. The demonstrated impact of this technical assistance offers lessons for collaborative and catalytic roles for aid agencies. Building on this momentum, I worked with local stakeholders on a proposal for the Bank to finance a comprehensive strategy and investment program for integrating digital technology into India’s development strategy (Hanna, 1994). The book outlines how the Bank failed to capture this opportunity to partner with a leading client for digital transformation.
In a follow-up, I describe my team’s efforts to get the Executive Board of the Bank to approve financial and technical assistance to a new e-Sri Lanka program, the Bank’s first holistic digital transformation investment. It was a pioneering program that was met by many institutional hurdles. It started under very difficult country conditions. It built momentum with pilots, institution building, and extensive partnerships within the country and my team’s commitment to overcome many hurdles within the Bank. Despite demonstrated achievements, Bank rigidities have since slowed the mainstreaming of holistic digital development assistance.
The book explores two broad themes: transforming government through demand for good government (DFGG), and smart cities. In an era of growing political and economic polarization, can the DFGG movement strengthen the demand for transparent, responsive, and effective government? In view of growing urbanization and concerns about climate change, would smart city applications help city leaders and stakeholders manage these challenges in spite of turf rivalries? Smart cities represent another promising area in support of resilience, innovation, inclusion, sustainable growth, and responsive public service delivery.
The book also explores digital transformation at the sector level, selecting the health sector, its challenges and opportunities. It shares lessons of experience on how to harness digital technology to create a holistic health learning system.
Drawing on emerging research, I compare the ways countries adopt national digital transformation strategies to advance sustainable development goals. Much can be learned from diverse country experiences. While national ambitions and goals for pursuing digital transformation do vary, key foundations and dynamics are shared. They present a rich learning agenda for practitioners: what scope and time horizon to take? What public-private balance to take? How to foster local learning, innovation, and inclusion?
The book draws on best country practices for driving digital transformation. It concludes with a synthesis of diverse country experience in economy-wide digital transformation. Lessons of experience are organized into five fundamental challenges: enabling holistic and sustained transformational change; local empowerment and broad ownership; leadership, institutions, and human resources; experimenting, learning and evaluating; and inclusion and diffusion. They apply equally to practitioners like me, and to countries and aid agencies. The book suggests how these challenges should be addressed by policy makers of developing countries and their counterparts in aid agencies.
* Nagy Hanna can be reached at nagyhanna@comcast.net
** Hanna, Nagy. 2024. Driving Digital Transformation in developing countries: Case studies. Palgrave/Springer is also available at Amazon.
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KEYWORDS AI, digital transformation, economic development, ICT.
