A Conversation with Jigme Tenzing, Acting Secretary of GovTech Bhutan
Thought Piece #18 With the Bhutanese parliament recently green-lighting the country's digital identity efforts, Tenzing talks digital payments, registering businesses and connecting the unconnected...
Like many, my first real encounter with Bhutan’s digital government came in learning of the country’s seven-year-old crown prince becoming its first digital citizen earlier this year. But interviewing Jigme Tenzing, the head of GovTech Bhutan, it is clear that the mountain nation’s digital legacy stretches far beyond this. In an hour-long discussion ranging in theme from paying for parking to starting a business, I was left with an overwhelming sense of a country hungry to stand on its own two feet at the forefront of GovTech innovation.
Earlier this year, Bhutan made headlines around the world when its seven-year-old crown prince became the first person in the country to be enrolled onto its new national digital ID system. Last month, the country’s parliament overwhelmingly voted in favor of a bill to enable the rollout of that same digital ID, marking a watershed moment for the Himalayan country.
It was by no means, however, Bhutan’s first foray into digital government. While its formal GovTech agency was only established in 2022, its department of ICT has been developing digital services for more than 20 years. Jigme Tenzing, the head of GovTech Bhutan, has been around for the whole journey.
Earlier this year, Bhutan’s crown prince became its first digital citizen (Source Adda 24/7)
The story of digital government development he tells me is in many ways a familiar one. In the early days of the Ministry of ICT - before any widespread acknowledgement of the importance of technology to governments - the first online service took five years to develop, and a great deal of effort to convince the relevant agencies that it would work. Then, with the election of Bhutan’s first democratic government in 2008 and the subsequent announcement of a new national project on digitizing government services, came an attempt to digitalize as many services as possible. “It was a numbers game”, Tenzing recalls, “but it was a numbers game targeted at digitizing what already existed”.
Fast forward to the present day and the country, like so many around the world, has begun to move beyond viewing GovTech through the lens of simply adopting technologies to thinking about how technology can provide better and more focused government services. When I ask Tenzing about the mistakes that were made in those early days, he laughs: “there were so many”. In hindsight, he tells me, “we went headfirst into making too many systems without thinking through the priorities of citizens”.
A renewed focus on addressing these priorities has required a new approach to gathering feedback and user needs, and balancing the accountability for this feedback between local and central government. In the early days of the Ministry of ICT, feedback was gathered through annual surveys, replaced today by live feedback prompts on the government’s existing digital services.
This dynamic approach to meeting citizen needs has been evident in the successes of Bhutan on the digital government front in recent years. The country has been lauded as the fastest place in the world to start a new business, beating out even the likes of Estonia in allowing entrepreneurs to register a company in less than a minute. In 2022 5,500 Bhutanese, almost 1% of the population, made use of this service.
Developing a digital payment gateway has also been a priority. Bhutan is one of the least densely populated countries on earth, making traditional banking and payments difficult. A digital payments’ gateway jointly developed by the government and central bank and introduced in 2017 has digitized 95% of transactions in the country over the past six years. “A couple of years ago, I only paid for parking in cash”, says Tenzing, “now even the parking attendants have QR codes”.
“The world’s first self-sovereign identity”: Building a Digital ID
Bhutan’s next challenge, and the one that has come to define Bhutan’s digital government approach, is digital identity. While the problem of analogue payment systems has largely been solved, citizens are still required in many cases to visit government offices to manually sign and scan documents. A digital identity, in linking a real person to a digital credential, would allow the government to trust that citizens are who they say they are. This could remove the need to do almost any government transaction in person (including digitalizing the submission of signatures and physical documents), Tenzing tells me.
In developing a solution, GovTech Bhutan looked first to digital leaders Estonia and Singapore for guidance, whose own identity solutions depend on a centralized Public Key Institute (PKI) model. These models require a centralized certifying authority for a digital ID system to be recognized by the government as providing proof of identity (think of a national ID or population register). The trouble is that these systems are large and often expensive to maintain, let alone to scale to a population level.
Instead, the government chose a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model (see interweave’s interview with Ireland’s Tony Shannon). Instead of a centralized ID system, self-sovereign identity puts digital ID management in the hands of individual citizens through a set of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) stored on the blockchain. As a basic premise, such a system requires three participants: a holder (here a Bhutanese citizen); issuer (here the government, but it could be anyone from a passport office to a university) and a verifier (e.g. a bank). Every time that a verifier requests information from a holder, they themselves can choose whether or not to allow access.
Bhutan’s own version of self-sovereign identity was completed earlier this year, but hasn’t yet begun its national rollout. When I spoke to Tenzing, GovTech Bhutan was still in the process of building use cases and integrating them onto the platform, such as working with banks to allow the digital identity to be used to open accounts online. Since our conversation, Bhutan’s parliament has overwhelmingly voted in favor of a bill legally permitting the use of digital identity.
There is still a great deal of work to be done. Over the past 12 years, internet access has increased from 14.4% to 85.6% of the population, but questions remain on how to connect the long tail of rural Bhutanese who remain unconnected.
The CTO of Druk Holdings and Investments, the commercial arm of Bhutan’s Government, recently gave an interview addressing precisely this question. Among the numerous initiatives being trialed to tackle this problem are storing the ID in the cloud or on a fingerprint-unlocked USB drive for those without a smartphone. They are also piloting a scheme to send support workers to a village twice a month with mobile devices, laptops and an internet connection to help people access their digital wallet.
Clearly there are still kinks to iron out. But through its digital identity system, Bhutan has developed a strong digital niche to share with the world, earning its place at the table in discussions on an issue that continues to set the global GovTech agenda. As our interview ends, I am left with a final reminder of Tenzing’s, and Bhutan’s, ambition in the space. Conversations have already begun with other governments around the world on using its Digital Identity as a verifiable travel credential. Not bad for a country that only introduced biometric passports late last year.