Women in GovTech: who is building the digital state?
A maternal health service. A national digital identity system. A platform connecting citizens with public services. Behind each is a practical question: how does a government turn an idea into a digital service that people can actually use and trust?
This is one of the questions explored in this episode of Code the State by Tuntufye Laura Ntaukira, Digital Governance Analyst at the United Nations Development Programme in Malawi and a mentor in the Women in GovTech Challenge 2026, and Oleksandr Iefremov, CEO of Kitsoft, whose team trains Challenge participants to build service prototypes using its open-source low-code platform Liquio.
Their conversation moves between Malawi's digital transformation efforts and Ukraine's experience with Diia, exploring what it takes to move from promising ideas and prototypes to public services that people can actually use and trust.
What the Women in GovTech Challenge actually builds
Ntaukira describes the Women in GovTech Challenge as a way to bring women with ideas for public services together with the tools, technical resources and expertise needed to turn those ideas into working prototypes.
In practice, a strong idea is not always enough. Participants may understand the problem they want to solve but lack the technical tools or expertise from other domains needed to build the service. The Challenge brings those elements together, allowing teams to move beyond discussing a problem and begin testing an actual solution.
Kitsoft's role is to provide and support one of the tools used in that process. Iefremov explains that the team deploys and supports Liquio throughout the Challenge and helps participants learn how to use the platform. The mentoring covers both business analysis, including how to structure service requirements, and development, allowing participants to build and publish prototypes in a test environment.
Because Liquio is open source, Oleksandr notes, the same platform can also be deployed within a government's own infrastructure. That can reduce the distance between a prototype developed during the Challenge and a service that could later move towards real-world implementation.
A maternal health service designed around feature phones
One of the projects that stood out to Tuntufye focuses on maternal healthcare.
She describes a challenge faced by expectant mothers who rely on physical books to record information from prenatal visits. These records can be damaged or lost, leaving mothers without a record of their health history during pregnancy. Women also need to keep track of future appointments and information about care during pregnancy, followed by immunisation and registration after a child is born.
The proposed service takes into account a practical constraint: many people in rural areas are more likely to have feature phones than smartphones. Instead of assuming that users can access an app, the prototype uses SMS to send reminders about hospital visits and, after birth, children's immunisation schedules.
For Tuntufye, the project is particularly relevant to Malawi. She notes that almost 80% of the country's population lives in rural areas and that women account for more than half of the population, making the problem significant in scale.
Oleksandr sees a parallel with Ukraine's experience. He recalls newborn registration as an early service his team worked on and points to the similarity between the priorities emerging in very different countries: services built around common life events often need to bring information and processes from different parts of government together.
From prototype to production
For Oleksandr, prototypes give governments a way to test whether an idea solves a concrete problem before investing in full implementation.
If a prototype demonstrates value, it can become a starting point for a production system. With a platform such as Liquio, he says, some of the same architecture and components used in a prototype can also be used as the service scales. That does not eliminate the work required for deployment, integration and staff training, but it gives teams something concrete to build on.
He notes that many successful digital public services have started with small pilots and prototypes before moving through controlled beta testing and eventually scaling. The important part is to move from experimentation to implementation in a structured way.
Malawi's digital strategy: consultation before code
Tuntufye is working on Malawi's national digital transformation strategy, which is being developed alongside an AI strategy.
The process builds on a Digital Readiness Assessment carried out using a UNDP framework to understand the country's strengths and gaps across areas relevant to digital transformation. Tuntufye points to infrastructure and Malawi's national digital ID system as areas of progress, noting that more than 13 million Malawians aged 16 and above have a national ID.
Government ownership has been central to the strategy process. Tuntufye explains that UNDP's role is to provide technical support rather than drive the strategy itself. Consultations were conducted across Malawi's three regions and brought together government, the private sector, civil society, media, development partners and academia.
But the process did not stop with workshops.
The team also developed a citizen engagement portal where people with access to a device can answer questions and create personas describing their circumstances, the challenges they face and what they would want their digital future to look like.
A farmer in a rural area, for example, might describe limited connectivity, lack of access to a device or difficulty finding information through digital platforms. These inputs are intended to help the strategy reflect what citizens themselves consider meaningful.
Tuntufye also uses the example of a farmer to show what connected digital services could eventually mean in practice. She first describes the different forms of digital credentials available or being developed in Malawi, including a digitally signed QR code that can be printed on paper and work towards a digital wallet.
She then imagines a farmer with a smartphone using digital services to access weather and soil information, make better planting decisions, find buyers and compare prices in a marketplace, and complete transactions online without having to visit a bank or meet a buyer in person.
Why adoption can fail even after a system is deployed
One of Tuntufye's most revealing examples comes from a pilot in a Malawian district where the national ID system was integrated with an electronic medical record system.
The aim was to identify patients correctly, improve the consistency of health records and address duplicate records. But the expected adoption did not follow. Citizens were reluctant to bring their IDs to health facilities, while some health workers were also reluctant to use the system.
Tuntufye describes several factors behind that resistance. On the citizen side, there was a lack of trust, alongside rumours, conspiracy narratives and some religious concerns. Within institutions, she also points to inefficiencies that can create personal benefits for some people, giving them little incentive to embrace systems that remove those inefficiencies.
The response required more than changing the technology. Her team worked with community leaders, including religious and traditional leaders, to explain why people were being asked to use their IDs at health facilities. Because communities already trusted these leaders, they could help build understanding around the system. Tuntufye says adoption increased after this outreach.
For her, the lesson reaches beyond this particular pilot:
“The technology doesn't come first.”
Digital government, she argues, needs to begin with people's actual problems and build systems around them rather than introducing technology simply because it is available.
How Ukraine connects digital identity with public services
Oleksandr sees a structural parallel in Ukraine's digital transformation.
Government institutions can operate according to their own rules, maintain separate registries and struggle to exchange information. Ukraine has addressed part of that challenge through digital identity, interoperability infrastructure and services that connect information from different government systems.
But having digital identity infrastructure is not enough if citizens do not understand why they need it. Oleksandr recalls that while businesses were more familiar with the value of digital identity, many citizens understood its usefulness only when it became connected to services they actually wanted to use, including grants and other forms of government support.
This changes the value proposition. Digital identity is no longer an abstract piece of infrastructure. It becomes the means through which a citizen can access a service and receive a result.
Oleksandr also points to the role of interoperability. Ukraine uses Trembita to connect government registries, while the Diia service ecosystem allows different authorities to build services around a shared approach. In his account, one of the biggest shifts was getting government teams to think about services from the citizen's perspective rather than around the boundaries of individual institutions.
He identifies two major challenges in that transformation: building public trust and changing the mindset of government officials towards citizen-centred service design. Technology, he argues, comes after those foundations.
Once citizens trust a digital channel, new services can also become easier to introduce. Oleksandr says Ukraine is now launching around ten digital services per month, with multiple small teams able to work in parallel.
Data protection, awareness and political will
Trust also depends on how governments handle people's data.
Tuntufye points to Malawi's data protection framework as an existing safeguard, but says citizen awareness remains a challenge. People need to understand what data protection means for them, while government ministries and departments also need appropriate rules for the data they handle.
She also highlights political will as an important factor in digital transformation. High-level government support can help move digital systems from policy into actual use, particularly when institutions are resistant to changing established ways of working.
The broader lesson from her experience is that deploying a system does not automatically produce adoption. Governments still need to explain why it exists, understand the interests and concerns of the people expected to use it, and build trust deliberately.
What governments starting out should do first
Asked what she would recommend to a minister who wants to begin building digital government, Tuntufye offers three practical steps.
First, assess where the country and government actually stand, including their regulatory, policy and implementation readiness. Second, identify priority sectors and the problems within them rather than beginning with technology. Third, start small and work in phases, demonstrating results before attempting to digitise government at scale.
Her reasoning is simple:
“People will trust what they see working.”
A phased approach gives governments an opportunity to prove that a service solves a real problem before expanding it more widely.
Oleksandr adds three priorities of his own. The first is the team: digital transformation requires people with the right expertise and cannot be carried by one person. The second is political and public support, which gives a project the mandate and time it needs to succeed.
His third priority is digital public infrastructure. Rather than designing everything in isolation, governments can learn from other countries and reuse components and methodologies developed through initiatives such as GovStack.
“Foundations should be created at the start.”
For Oleksandr, choosing an architecture that can scale is part of making sure today's first services do not become tomorrow's constraints.
Why open source matters for governments
The conversation returns to the Women in GovTech Challenge as a place where teams can build, test and exchange ideas with practitioners facing similar challenges in other countries.
Tuntufye adds one final lesson from Malawi's experience: governments should consider open-source tools. She points to both cost and the risk of vendor lock-in, noting that Malawi has encountered cases where governments became dependent on particular vendors.
That principle also connects back to the way participants work during the Challenge. They are not only discussing how digital public services might work. They are building prototypes with tools that can potentially continue beyond the programme itself.
Listen to the full episode
This article draws on a conversation from Code the State's Women in GovTech series with Tuntufye Laura Ntaukira and Oleksandr Iefremov. Listen to the full episode, Women in GovTech: who is building the digital state?, for their complete discussion on digital public infrastructure, trust, digital identity, prototyping, Malawi's digital transformation and the lessons governments can learn from one another.
