Govtech: what it means, who builds it and how governments buy it

Govtech, short for government technology, is the software, data and digital infrastructure that public bodies use to run their own operations and to serve people and businesses. The word has two senses: a broad one, covering all of that technology and the reforms around it, and a narrow one, covering how governments buy new solutions from start-ups and small firms. The broad sense is the World Bank's: its GovTech programme supports the adoption of technology and use of data to enhance government effectiveness and efficiency. The narrow sense is the European Commission's, which has described govtech as the process where the public sector engages with start-ups and SMEs to procure innovative technology solutions.

This guide explains both senses, sets out how govtech differs from digital government and civic tech, and walks through the main areas, the World Bank's GovTech Maturity Index, the ways governments buy from small firms, examples from every region and the risks. It does not rank or recommend vendors.

What govtech means

In the broad sense, govtech is a reform agenda as much as a set of tools. The World Bank launched its GovTech Initiative in 2019 and defines GovTech as “a whole-of-government approach to public sector modernization that promotes simple, efficient, and transparent government, with citizens at the center of reforms”, according to its 2022 GovTech Maturity Index report. The bank's index measures four areas: core government systems and shared digital infrastructure, online public service delivery, digital citizen engagement, and GovTech enablers such as strategy, law and skills.

In the narrow sense, govtech is a market. The European Commission's 2023 definition centres on the public sector engaging with start-ups and SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). Poland's GovTech Polska, an advisory team to the Council of Ministers working in the Ministry of Digital Affairs, describes govtech for start-ups and SMEs as a fast-growing market with easier access to public procurement. In Lithuania, the GovTech Lab asks public institutions to set challenges and entrepreneurs to develop the solutions.

“GovTech” is also a name. The Government Technology Agency of Singapore, known as GovTech, is a statutory board under the Ministry of Digital Development and Information that supports public agencies in delivering digital services and oversees government ICT (information and communications technology) infrastructure. It created Singpass, the digital identity residents use for government and business services online. See IQGov's Singapore profile.

Govtech, digital government and civic tech: how they differ

Digital government is the goal: a state that is designed around digital services and data. IQGov's guide to digital government covers it in full. Govtech is the means and the supply side: the platforms, the systems and the teams and firms that build them. The two are measured in similar ways. The World Bank's index uses all three components of the UN E-Government Development Index (EGDI) as inputs, and in 2022 48 of the 60 countries with very high EGDI scores were also in the index's top group. IQGov's Government Index shows the EGDI for all 193 UN member states.

In this guide, civic tech means technology built by citizens and non-profit groups to improve public life, sometimes with government as a partner. Code for America calls itself the country's leading civic tech nonprofit and works by partnering with government at all levels. In the UK, mySociety, a charity established in 2003, runs tools such as FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow. The World Bank's 2025 index found that civic tech approaches generally lag behind other GovTech focus areas. For an example of civic technologists working inside a state programme, see IQGov's report on Maryland's Medicaid redesign.

What govtech covers

Most govtech falls into a handful of areas. Each item below gives one real, sourced example.

• Digital identity. Singapore's Singpass gives access to over 2,700 services across 800 government agencies and businesses, with over 41 million transactions every month by 5 million users. Brazil's gov.br account proves online that “you are you” and opens services from the public health system to the digital work card.
• Payments. GOV.UK Pay, built by the UK's Government Digital Service, is used by more than 1,500 live services and processes more than 70,000 payments a day across central and local government, police and the NHS.
• Case management. Common Platform is a case management system designed and developed by HM Courts & Tribunals Service for the Crown and magistrates' courts in England and Wales; it had handled over 2.3 million criminal cases by February 2025.
• Procurement. Ukraine's Prozorro is a hybrid e-procurement system, built by business, government and civil society, in which a central state database feeds privately run marketplaces and the code is open. Ukraine's government said in July 2016 that it would cover all public procurement from 1 August 2016.
• Data exchange and platforms. X-Road is open-source software for secure data exchange between organisations. In Estonia, where it is the backbone of e-Estonia, more than 3,800 e-services run on it.
• AI in public services. The UK's Consult, built by the Incubator for AI in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, uses AI to extract themes from consultation responses, which civil servants then review. See also IQGov's reports on Singapore's government translator and Google.org's AI challenge for governments.
• Cybersecurity. The UK National Cyber Security Centre's Active Cyber Defence programme “seeks to reduce the harm from commodity cyber attacks” with services free at the point of use. In the US, the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation programme of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency aims to protect federal civilian networks.
• Back-office systems. The World Bank's index checks for financial management, tax, customs, human resources and payroll systems.

The World Bank GovTech Maturity Index

The GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI) is the World Bank's measure of govtech across countries. It is a composite index that uses 48 key indicators, including eight external ones, across four focus areas in 198 economies. The four areas carry 17, nine, six and 16 indicators respectively: core government systems, public service delivery, digital citizen engagement and GovTech enablers. The World Bank stresses that the GTMI is not intended to create a ranking or to assess a country's performance, but to provide a baseline and show where to improve.

The first edition was launched in 2021 on 2020 data collected remotely from government websites. The 2022 update relied mainly on an online survey: 135 economies submitted data directly and data for the other 63 were collected remotely. The bank warns that the 2022 version is not directly comparable with the 2020 version because of new indicators.

The group definitions, counts and averages above come from tables 2.3 and 2.4 and the main messages of the 2022 report; the World Bank's 2022 index page confirms that all 198 economies are grouped from A to D by average score. Countries in each group in 2022 included, according to the report's table 3.2:

• Group A: Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, India, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States, joined in 2022 by economies including Bangladesh, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Uganda and Ukraine.
• Group B: Armenia, China, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, the Philippines, Poland, Rwanda and Vietnam, joined by economies including Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Fiji and Nigeria.
• Group C: Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Senegal and Zimbabwe; Nepal moved down to this group.
• Group D: Chad, Iraq, Kiribati, Liberia, South Sudan and Yemen.

Between 2020 and 2022, 52 economies moved up one group, 10 moved down and 136 stayed where they were. Income matters: high-income and upper-middle-income economies made up 58 per cent and 26 per cent of Group A. One indicator asks directly about start-ups: whether there is a government policy to support GovTech start-ups and private sector investment. In 2022, 101 economies reported such a policy, but only 40 had a procurement policy prioritising start-ups or SMEs.

The 2025 edition covers 197 economies, with survey answers from 158 and public data for 39. According to the World Bank's summary, 41 per cent of economies are now in Group A, up from about 35 per cent in 2022; about 70 per cent of Europe and Central Asia is in Group A, against 13 per cent in Africa. The country examples above are from the 2022 report, the latest edition whose full group list IQGov has checked.

Who supplies government technology

Government technology comes from several kinds of supplier. One is the state itself: in-house teams such as the UK Government Digital Service, which built GOV.UK Pay, or HM Courts & Tribunals Service, which designed and developed Common Platform. Others include the start-ups and SMEs that the European Commission's definition puts at the centre, and civic tech non-profits such as Code for America. The UK National Audit Office lists engaging commercial partners as one of six areas that decision-makers need to get right to give digital change the best chance of success.

Governments have built several routes for buying from smaller firms:

• Open marketplaces. The UK's G-Cloud 14 is an online catalogue that all public sector organisations and charities can use to buy cloud services, listing over 4,000 suppliers and over 46,000 services. G-Cloud 14 runs until 28 October 2026 and will then be replaced by G-Cloud 15. It is run by the Government Commercial Agency, which replaced the Crown Commercial Service on 1 April 2026.
• Challenge-based competitions. GovTech Polska runs competitions that start from a problem rather than a specification: an institution reports a problem, a technical dialogue follows, and a contractor is chosen in two steps. GovTech Polska says its average competition attracts about 50 contractors, about 20 times more than the average tender.
• Innovation partnerships. The EU's public procurement directive requires member states to let contracting authorities use innovation partnerships, which combine development and purchase. Luxembourg's GovTech Lab, a joint initiative of the Ministry for Digitalisation and the Government IT Centre (CTIE), launched in November 2020 with a call to tell humans and bots apart in online procedures. In its process, a jury picks at most five candidates for a proof of concept, one moves to design, and the whole takes six to eight months on average.
• GovTech labs and accelerators. Lithuania's GovTech Lab, part of the Innovation Agency Lithuania and funded by the European Regional Development Fund, takes challenges submitted by public institutions and helps start-ups and SMEs validate their ideas.
• Cross-border pilots. The European GovTech incubator, GovTech4All, brings together 32 digital agencies from 20 European countries; its second phase launched eight pilots in June 2025 and also covers start-up-driven challenges and new models of public procurement.

Govtech around the world

• Europe. Estonia's X-Road data exchange has 78,000 organisations as indirect users, and a federation with Finland was set up in February 2018. Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation said in October 2024 that the Diia app had 21 million unique users, 24 documents and more than 30 services. See the Estonia and Ukraine profiles.
• Asia. Besides Singapore's GovTech agency, Bangladesh offers an example: its Department of Information and Communication Technology has led the Digital Bangladesh agenda since 2012, a National e-Service Bus connects heavily used services through APIs, and citizens reach online services through the MyGov portal. See the Bangladesh profile.
• Africa. In Tanzania, the Government Communications Network connects 72 ministries, departments and agencies and 77 local government authorities, and a government e-office system handles the movement of files and documents. In Uganda, the National Information Technology Authority provides a national data centre, and an eCitizen portal offers services such as e-tax and business registration. Africa remains furthest behind: four of 48 economies were in Group A in 2022.
• The Americas. Ecuador has had a government policy on open-source software since 2016 and a national platform, Diálogo 2.0, for citizens to propose policy ideas. Mexico stayed in Group A in 2022, and the World Bank lists Interopera MX, to improve interoperability of existing core government systems and services, among its progress. On US state digital teams, see IQGov's report on Virginia's new digital service.
• The Middle East. Oman's online portal lets citizens start a business or establish an e-residency, and its online job portal is the primary job portal for public and private sector employment. Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all moved up to Group A in 2022. See the Oman profile.
• Oceania. Australia and New Zealand were in Group A in 2022, Fiji moved up from C to B and Samoa from D to C, while Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu were in Group D. See the Australia and New Zealand profiles.

Risks and what goes wrong

Large IT projects fail often. In 2021 the UK National Audit Office found that despite 25 years of government strategies there is a consistent pattern of underperformance, often because decision makers fix on technology solutions before the basics are thought through. In the US, the Government Accountability Office says the federal government invests more than $100 billion a year on IT, mostly on running existing systems, that investments “too frequently fail or run over budget and over schedule”, and that 463 of its recommendations had not been implemented as of January 2025. IQGov's analysis Breaking the megaproject looks at two British cases.

Vendor lock-in. The UK competition regulator's cloud services market investigation, which published its final decision on 31 July 2025, examined egress fees and licensing, and recommended that the regulator use its digital markets powers to consider strategic market status for Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. Some governments have open-source policies: the World Bank index asks whether a government has an open-source software policy for the public sector. See IQGov's Who owns the government cloud? and The state as a platform.

Barriers for small firms. Most countries do not tilt procurement towards newcomers: in 2022 only 40 economies had a procurement policy prioritising start-ups or SMEs, and the World Bank's conclusions called for more incentives to GovTech start-ups and SMEs. Transparency is thin too: only about 25 per cent of dedicated govtech entities disclose information about their governance and performance.

Accessibility. Public services must work for disabled people. EU law requires public sector websites and apps to be made perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, and Section 508 in the US applies whenever federal agencies develop, procure, maintain, or use information technology, so buying a product in does not remove the duty. See IQGov's report on the US Web Design System.

Weak foundations. The 2025 index found that nearly half of economies still lack fully implemented cloud and interoperability backbones, and that about four in 10 still lack an operational one-stop service portal. On AI in software delivery, see IQGov's report on the US immigration agency's agentic software factory.