Estonia introduces the possibilities of GovStack components for developing e-government in Tanzania

It was the first Estonian-led and funded GovStack Deep Dive. The event focused on Tanzania’s digital health wallet, Jamii Health Wallet, and involved private-sector companies and digital experts: Helena Lepp (Digital Nation), Kedi Välba (Aktors) and Aare Lapõnin (Fiscal Admin).

“Estonia and Tanzania have already had a positive experience cooperating in the digital field, an important prerequisite for implementing GovStack principles. I am very pleased that Tanzania was the destination of the first GovStack Deep Dive, led and funded entirely by ESTDEV,” said Marika Popp, GovStack project lead for Estonia.

GovStack Deep Dive is a two-day workshop that provides participants with a thorough understanding of the GovStack platform and practical skills for developing and implementing digital services in the public and private sectors.

While the workshop in Tanzania covered the broader principles of GovStack, the primary focus was on using digital technologies in healthcare. Jamii Health Wallet, developed in Tanzania, offers citizens a secure and efficient solution for managing everything related to their health care. Since this platform already uses some GovStack components, such as payments, digital identity, and registries, this use case provided a real-life example of the value that GovStack can create.

“Over the two days, the workshop participants got an overview of the GovStack approach and came up with very practical industry-specific use cases during the discussions. It was clear that interest in the topic is very high, and there is a real need to harmonise the approach across the country to create a unified digital architecture,” said the CEO of Estonian software company Aktors, Kedi Välba, who led the Deep Dive. Aktors has prior experience working in Tanzania, helping to implement the X-road data exchange platform, known locally as Jamii X-Change.

The workshop was attended by health care sector professionals, representatives from public and private hospitals, a representative from the Ministry of Health, and the primary leaders of the country's digitalisation efforts: the Tanzanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the ICT Commission, and the Personal Data Protection Commission.

A collaborative effort between the Estonian government, the German government, DIAL (Digital Impact Alliance), and ITU (International Telecommunications Union created the GovStack initiative in 2020. By developing technical specifications for mutually compatible digital government components, known as building blocks, GovStack supports the development of a democratic digital society. These specifications enable each country to develop digital services that meet its needs. GovStack also offers a sandbox for testing and prototyping digital services and shares best practices for building an e-government to support countries that want to digitalise their services using the GovStack approach.