Estonia

Estonia is often hailed as a leader in digital government. A small country bordering the Baltic Sea, it may have a small population, but it has big ideas. In many ways, it is a country of opposites. Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, is one of the best preserved medieval cities in Europe, yet it is also one of the most digitally advanced countries in the world, with all government services fully digital. It was also the first country in the world to launch electronic voting during its 2005 election. So how did this Baltic state end up as the champion of digital? One of the main drivers behind its digital ambitions, and quite possibly the reason Estonia has done so well, is former Estonian government CIO Taavi Kotka, a former tech entrepreneur who took the reins of Estonia’s digital government in 2013, when he became CIO.

Kotka’s answer to why Estonia has been so successful in imple- menting digital government? “If you truly need something, you can actually achieve it,” he says. This is also the reason why some countries, the UK included, are struggling, he says. “All these governments wanting to create a digital government, they might truly want that, but they don’t actually need it. Estonia actually needed it. We had a pain, and that’s why this e-government or e-society was created.” Kotka says that in Estonia, with its population of 1.3 million, vast forests covering 50% of the country and 2,000 tiny islands, something had to be done. “If you have a huge amount of land but don’t have enough people to serve other people, you need to push people to self-serve,” he says.

In the UK, not having a fully digital government “isn’t so bad”, says Kotka, and because it is functioning just fine without digital, “you don’t have a push to move to digital”. He adds: “For me, it’s like a person with a weight problem. So I say I’m fat and I should exercise more, and I talk about it but I never go to the gym. Now, think about it like this: if you don’t exercise, you’ll be dead. That’s the kind of pain we’re talking about in Estonia. In the UK, it’s more like knowing you should be doing something, but being too lazy to do it.”

So how has Estonia done it? A lot of it has to do with trust and willingness to try, says Kotka. “There has to be a certain level of trust, and people need to trust that the government is actually able to make these kinds of changes,” he says. “It is also a question about how you approach those problems.” In Estonia, there is an inherent belief in digital, both among resi- dents and government. In health- care, for example, if your doctor has all the relevant information about your medical history, they can treat you better. “If you believe that, then it’s a question of how to solve that in a way where it’s not a privacy issue – and technology allows you to do that,” says Kotka. He adds that Estonia has achieved something the UK is desperately trying to do – all the country’s hospitals are connected, so patient data can be seamlessly transferred and accessed by an appropriate clinician. When it comes to creating digital services, a key focus is oftenskills, or rather the lack of them – particularly among the elderly, or those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

In the UK, there is talk of a skills divide, where millions do not have digital skills and 5.8 million people have not used the internet at all, which is said to cost the economy about ￡63bn a year. Kotka takes the view that although digital skills are “quite important”, it’s not as big a problem as it was 15 years ago. In many cases, Estonians are not given a choice on whether to use digital services. But Kotka says this is simply because the country’s citizens prefer using digital services, and the government has shut down physical offices because they are no longer efficient. “It’s still a problem, but it’s not a huge one,” he says. “I have noticed that many western countries, including the UK, are always using this as an excuse not to go to the gym. You should solve the problem for 80% and then worry about the 20%. So you shouldn’t put the 20% in the first decision. Don’t use the skills gap as an excuse not to go to the gym. One of the key success elements for e-government is: never try to find a 100% solution that fits everybody. You need to under- stand that if you start designing your solutions and services for, say, 85% of the people, you will be way more successful than try- ing to design everything for 100% of the population.”

Kotka points out that Estonia’s approach is nowhere near as radical as Denmark’s, which has a “digital only” approach. Estonia has been flying the flag for digital for a while now. It is more than 10 years since the country introduced paperless government meetings, and nearly 100% of the country’s popula- tion carry smart ID cards to prove their identity when accessing online services. Kotka, who has been keeping an eye on what is happening around digital identity in the UK, and the UK government’s development of Gov.uk, says part of the reason it has been rather a struggle is that it’s been made into a political matter – a huge no-no, according to Kotka. “You have to differentiate between engineering questions and political questions, so the UK has made an engineering question a political question,” he says. “You cannot build digital govern- ment without unique identifiers, so it is an engineering thing. Don’t make it political. As long as you make it political, there won’t be any digital government or society in the UK.”

Estonia’s smart ID cards were the forerunner of Kotka’s main claim to fame – the Estonian e-residency programme, which was launched in 2014. An Estonian e-residency is a transnational digital identity available to anyone in the world interested in administering a business online. In 2015, the country began taking e-residency applications, giving ID cards to foreigners and giving them access to government services. So far, there are nearly 40,000 e-residents from 161 countries around the globe, including more than 2,000 from the UK, with 206 of those having established new companies in Estonia, according to its e-residents’ dashboard. Kotka says Estonia needed to do something to improve the economy and increase the wealth of the country and its people. “You can do that through different methods. You can increase the amount of tourists – which is a big problem for us,” he says, because the Estonian climate makes it an unpopular destination. The second method is through immigration, but again, he says “no one wants to come”. The third method is through increasing the country’s birth rate, but Estonia has a negative birth rate, says Kotka, “so we had to come up with something new”. Kotka believes Estonia can reach people beyond the country’s boundaries. “Why can’t we serve people from anywhere in the world who want to have business in Europe?” he says. “Those were questions we asked ourselves, and decided to create an e-residency which is not like a visa, or the Schengen Agreement, but allows you to access all our business environ- ment, plus legal, and all of our APIs [application programming interfaces] and services.” For UK companies that want to do business with Europe after Brexit, Estonian e-residency is wide open, says Kotka. Estonia is most certainly open for business.