Estonia: Lessons from the doyen of digital

Imagine living in a country where, if you are pulled over by a traffic officer, he taps on his smartphone and on typing your car plate number, your information spills out.

The software on his phone shows your headshot, your car insurance information, your criminal history (if any) and past traffic offences.

Think of a country with free-of-charge Wi-Fi, available at every corner. Not spotty, on-off Wi-Fi, but superfast. Well, Estonia, a small country in Northern Europe, fits this picture. Estonia has carved a name as the world’s most digital country.

It has set the precedent on how innovation can be done right: An example that other countries can emulate.

Nearly all services in Estonia are online. If you are getting married, getting a divorce or buying a property, you would have to appear in person to the relevant presiding officer — but that’s just about how far in person services get.

Virtually all other services are online — you don’t need to go to an office to get services.

Citizens file their tax returns online. Drivers pay for parking using their mobile phones. In school, class attendance records, homework and grades are all online for parents to access anytime.

Health facilities are inter-linked and patients’ records are electronic. Classrooms are about to go paperless, and so are registrations for businesses, goods and services. Even voting is via the internet.

Citizens log in using highly secure and unique identity cards to access their digitally-stored personal information that’s housed in hundreds of different but interlinked databases.

A child born in Estonia is automatically assigned a personal ID by which they access the online services when they become of age.

Citizens sign documents digitally using secure signatures. Digital signatures carry the same legal weight as paper signatures in other countries.

Estonia’s inflection point came about 25 years ago when the government made sweeping plans to eliminate paper in its businesses, thereby setting the table for a digital country.

Its digital prowess is predicated upon “innovation with a purpose”, which means that the country creates technology — not just for the sake of going digital, but because of the motivation to make the lives of its citizens better.

Estonia builds its digital services on a common technology across all government departments — as opposed to each ministry or department building its independent, siloed and inflexible digital system.

Building of the same platform ensures tech-systems can talk to each other. It makes it possible for the government to provide services to citizens in different departments without citizens having to re-enter their basic information at every service delivery point.

With a paltry population of only 1.3 million people, Estonia is at the bottom rung in the world’s population measurements.

But digitally, Estonia is the doyen; the elephant in the digital grazing field. It’s an apt country to benchmark, literally and digitally.