A conversation with Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Slovenia's Minister for Digital Transformation

Edition #61 Slovenia's digital minister on digital inclusion, interoperable building blocks, and why lego is an apt metaphor for digital government transformation...

I first came across Emilija Stojmenova Duh through last year’s Tallinn Digital Summit, where she spoke on a panel about the interplay between digital development and the green transition. In her short opening remarks, she set the scene for Slovenia’s twin transition as one premised on openness; responsiveness and resilience. The examples she drew upon were diverse – open data portals to share the carbon footprint of the Slovenian government’s digital initiatives; using technology for disaster recovery; and embracing circularity through a state-of-the-art data center cooled by nearby river water and able to transfer its excess heat into the surrounding residential buildings.

After these remarks moderator Linnar Viik – recognising the bigger picture emerging from these disparate initiatives – drew upon the idea of incremental change, of small cumulative steps building into a broad nationwide transition. This is in many ways a fitting metaphor for Stojmenova Duh’s career to date – her appointment as digital minister is the cumulation of a variety of roles at a telecoms company, managing a set of innovation networks, and spending time as an Associate Professor.

Emilija Stojmenova Duh at the Tallinn Digital Summit

I begin our interview by asking her about these early roles, and how they have prepared her for her time as minister. “I couldn’t imagine being a minister if I hadn’t been involved in such ecosystems earlier”, she tells me, with the telecoms industry giving her an insight into end-to-end innovation processes, and universities showing her the challenge of transferring research not just into industry but across broader communities throughout Slovenia too.

“Our brothers’ and sisters’ lego”: building a multistakeholder digital transformation

This idea of knowledge transfer is front and center of the Slovenian digital ministry’s approach to digitalization, as one might expect from a department led by a former professor. Universities play a key part in this, not least through a cross-sectoral working group set up at the country’s new National Centre on AI – lauded by Minister of Innovation Dr Igor Papic as “the beginning of a good story, which we will deliver on”.

But so too do municipalities and local governments, 212 in total across Slovenia. “We talk about a multistakeholder approach all the time”, says Stojmenova Duh, “politics is all about negotiations and understanding what different stakeholders think”. Taking leave from her time coordinating academic and innovation networks across the country, Stojmenova Duh has a full-time staff member in her department dedicated to collaborating with local municipalities, asking for their opinions when planning policies and opening tenders, and sharing with them digital government products, strategies and guides produced in Ljubliana.

It hasn’t always been that way for Slovenia. Just three years ago, it allocated the smallest proportion of national resources to digitalization among EU countries, and was in danger of being left behind by its peers. “Everybody was pulling in different directions, without a common picture of where they wanted Slovenia to go”.

Transforming this situation into a “multistakeholder approach” has demanded a concrete focus on interoperability. We return to Tallinn, and its digital summit, as Stojmenova Duh compares her country’s digitalization task to that of Estonia. Imagining digital building blocks as lego bricks, she tells me that “Estonia started with a new box of lego” in building their digital government from scratch while Slovenia - navigating legacy technologies and analogue systems - “had to use the lego of older brothers and sisters”.

The country’s digitalization journey, which is just starting to gather momentum, has thus been one of working out how to dismantle lego pieces and fit them back together where necessary. Interoperable solutions have become the priority, including a governmental cloud for departments to access shared data, electronic IDs (now with 500,000 users, 25% of Slovenia’s population), and five interoperable building blocks that have established data bridges across IT solutions and sectors.

“Digi info points” and “Mobile Heroes”: digital inclusion and equal opportunities

Last year, Stojmenova Duh became the first female minister and representative of Slovenia to take over as Chair of the ITU’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), one of the UN body’s pre-eminent forums focused primarily on closing the digital divide. A year earlier, at the ITU’s global strategy setting meeting in Romania, she argued for the right to connectivity and digital infrastructure “whether you live in an urban or rural area, [are] female or male, a young person or an old person”.

Stojmenova Duh became the first representative of Slovenia to Chair the ITU’s WSIS

We pick up that theme in the context of Slovenia, where Stojmenova Duh’s priorities over her eighteen months as minister have been “doing the work that wasn’t done in the past”. “When I came into office we were lagging behind everywhere” she says, including in digital accessibility. Fast forward to 2024, and the digital ministry has introduced a range of accessibility initiatives, including a computer fund to provide electronic devices for free to those who cannot afford them.

The two flagship initiatives of this accessibility drive have been “digi info points” and “mobile heroes”. interweave has covered Thailand and Bangladesh’s digital government counters before, and Slovenia’s “digi info points” offer a similar service, with 222 physical counters nationwide for people to go and ask for help on navigating the government’s digital services. “Mobile Heroes” takes a leaf from Poland’s Future Labs, developing an award-winning app called Magda for seniors to build digital skills and traveling around rural areas of the country to deliver workshops on using communication tools and digital programs.

With such a range of priorities, the test for Slovenia going forward will be continuing - to return to that panel in Tallinn - to connect those individual dots needed to deliver their 2030 strategy. The country’s digital government efforts have reaped some recent rewards, including being the first nation to provide the EU with a national plan to meet the bloc’s digital targets. To deliver on this strategy, Stojmenova Duh’s plans are two-fold. Firstly, raising the profile of digital government across the country through existing associations and networks, consultations, and meetings. Then, having laid the foundations for a Digital Slovenia, will come a focus on advanced technologies – the likes of quantum computing and generative AI – where the Centre for AI may well play a crucial role.

For Stojmenova Duh, digital transformation may begin with government, but it doesn’t end there. When I ask her about her ambitions for Slovenia over the next few years, the answer I receive is not directly related to her own work, but stretches far more broadly. “In Slovenia, we don’t have a unicorn, but I believe the first one will be in quantum computing”.