four years later: mykhailo fedorov and the state in a smartphone
ukraine's digital transformation
A little more than four years ago, I was in Ukraine covering the effect of disinformation on the country’s 2019 presidential election as part of a Pulitzer Center grant. One of my first interviews during that two-week reporting stint was with Mykhailo Fedorov, then Zelenskyy’s digital campaign manager.
Then, he was a plucky 28-year-old strategizing about how to reach the youth vote on Telegram and how to avoid his campaign being besieged by bots. Today, Fedorov, 32, is Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and leads the Ministry of Digital Transformation—a fitting title, since he’s been able to bring much of it to Ukraine. I saw him for a catch-up last week while I was in Kyiv, and I’ve been reflecting on all the positive change he has led in Ukraine, even as the country has dealt with a full-scale invasion, a bevy of international political crises (remember impeachment?!), and, oh yeah, a pandemic.
Diia—the Ukrainian government’s “state in a smartphone” app—officially launched in February 2020. In Ukrainian, “Diia” means “activity,” but it’s also a clever acronym; “Di i Ya—Derzhava i Ya,” means “government and me”. The Ministry started digitizing identification and other documents, beginning with driver’s licenses and car registrations. Next, it moved onto passports. As of mid-2023, Diia offered access to 15 documents and the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) passed a bill making them legally equivalent to their paper counterparts. Seventy percent of Ukrainian smartphones have Diia installed.
But Diia isn’t just a digital filing cabinet; it also allows you to complete over 50 government services on your smartphone, including—according to the Ministry—opening a private liability company in just 30 minutes. I heard from a number of Ukrainians I spoke with while in Kyiv that Diia has made a positive difference in their lives. One man even told me that after losing his father, a serviceman, in the Russian invasion, he was able to more easily access his father’s compensation and distribute it among family members thanks to Diia.
I’ve had my own run-ins with Ukraine’s post-Soviet bureaucracy; when I was doing my Fulbright, the process of getting a residency permit was a long and arduous one that required multiple trips to a government office on the outskirts of town, specific types of folders and multiple photocopies on certain sizes of paper, and an interview with a stern woman who still, despite my best efforts, found things wrong with the documents I presented. By all accounts, it seems processes like these are simplified for most Ukrainians now.
Most importantly for Ukraine, however, by eliminating person-to-person interactions between citizens and the government, there are many fewer points for petty corruption to take root. The days of speeding along business permitting by slipping a bureaucrat a 1000 grivna note are gone.
Fedorov has also integrated a number of other interesting features into Diia—you can report the position of enemy troops, file a claim for compensation if your house is damaged by Russian shelling, purchase war bonds, stream radio and television services (critical for those who may not have access to Ukrainian signals), and even stream educational units for school-aged kids (Fedorov pioneered this effort during the pandemic, and it became even more critical as the full-scale invasion began and children were uprooted from attending school in person). The app also sends polls out to citizens, asking them their opinions on issues like what to re-dub streets that previously sported Russian names.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention privacy concerns; surveillance-minded Ukrainians rightly point out that the app gives the government a potentially unwelcome entry point into their lives. It could, of course, be the target for Russian (or other) cyberattacks. There were data leaks in 2019 before the app’s “official” launch, and large-scale cyberattacks in 2021-22. After that, the Ministry promised to publish the app’s code for outside audits; privacy professionals are upset this still has not happened more than a year later. Making good on this promise would be a good step in continuing to build trust in government among the population. But overall, Diia and the Ministry of Digitalization appear to be improving the lives of millions of Ukrainians and leading the way for other countries to do the same.
I’ve written before on how frustrating I find the lack of digitalization in the United States; for such a tech-savvy country, our systems are not user friendly, don’t support contact between citizens and their representatives, and are largely not interoperable. Now, we have another case study in digitalization to point to in Ukraine, and even fewer excuses—if a country at war can do it, what’s stopping us?
I look forward to checking in with Mykhailo on future trips to Ukraine and following the continued innovation he brings to his country.
Great article, thank you. But please next time, hryvnia not grivna.