Diia (; also an acronym for ) is a mobile app, a web portal and a brand of e-governance in Ukraine.
Launched in 2020, the Diia app allows Ukrainian citizens to use digital documents on their smartphones instead of physical ones for identification and sharing purposes. The Diia portal allows access to over 50 government services. Eventually, the government plans to make all kinds of state-person interactions available through Diia.
Diia was built in partnership with the USA and is poised to be shared with other countries. On the sidelines of the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said the US hopes to replicate the success of Diia in other countries.
History
Diia was first presented on September 27, 2019 by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine as a brand of the State in a Smartphone project. Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov announced the creation of a mobile app and a web portal that would unite in a single place all the services provided by the state to citizens and businesses.
On February 6, 2020, the mobile app Diia was officially launched. During the presentation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 9 million Ukrainians now have access to their driver's license and car registration documents on their phones, while Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk called the implementation of the State in a Smartphone project a priority for the government.
In April 2020, the Ukrainian government approved a resolution for experimental usage of digital ID-cards and passports which would be issued to all Ukrainians via the Diia.
On October 5, 2020, during the Diia Summit, the government presented a first major update of the app and web portal branded "Diia 2.0". More types of documents were added to the app as well as the ability to share documents with others via a single tap on a push-message. The web portal in turn expanded the number of available services to 27, including the ability to register a private limited company in half an hour. President Zelensky who opened the summit, announced that in 2021 Ukraine will enter the "paper less" mode by prohibiting civil servants from demanding paper documents.
By the end of 2020, the app had more than six million users, while the portal had 50 available services.
In March 2021, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a bill equating digital identity documents with their physical analogues. Starting on August 23, Ukrainian citizens can use digital ID-cards and passports for all purposes while in Ukraine. According to Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine will become the first country in the world where digital identity documents are considered legally equivalent to ordinary ones.
Benefits and challenges
The first and most obvious benefit is the convenience of such a platform. Citizens can have many documents on their smartphones at once, without concern about losing or damaging them. Whenever needed, they can just open an app on their smartphones and show/check the document they need. The idea is that Diia will help cut the bureaucracy associated with public services, which in turn will help fight corruption and increase government savings. Fewer people are needed to be employed in the public sector and fewer human to human interactions are supposed to happen. With the start of the program, already 10% of government employees were reduced, which contributes to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, but besides this, the initiative also improves the speed, efficiency, and transparency of government services. In addition, the digitalization of the government sector helps to develop the whole IT industry in the country, people become more digitally aware and educated, this affects other sectors as well, increasing the spread of digital infrastructure and expediting the speed of overall digitalization.
The UN E-government Development Index, which assesses the capabilities of governments to integrate its functions electronically, such as the use of internet and mobile devices, ranked Ukraine 69th in 193 countries surveyed in 2020.
Despite its low ranking in the e-government development index, Ukraine made a big jump on the e-participation index, which they ranked 43rd out of 193 countries from 0.66 in 2018 to 0.81 in 2020 (un.org, 2020), suggesting that the government and its citizens are adapting the IT-based government functions.