With a population of around 1.3 million, Estonia ranks among the most digitally advanced countries in the world. According to Freedom House, this country also enjoys one of the most significant economic, press, and Internet freedoms globally.

The secret of being a digital powerhouse lies in the pioneering advances made by its government under its innovative e-Estonia initiative – fostering innovative education, virtual business, and digital citizenship.

The inspiring story of how Estonia became e-Estonia began in 1996, with the Tiger Leap Foundation’s help, a government-backed technology investment body. After the independence from the Soviet Union back in 1991, Estonia decided that the online economy and massive technological innovation was the way forward for a small country with no natural resources to lean on. Through Tiger Leap Foundation, all Estonian schools were online by the late 1990s, and significant investments were made in computer infrastructure and networking.

Five years later, ten private and public businesses formed a robust public-private partnership, creating the Look@World Foundation. This project raised digital awareness and popularized the use of the Internet and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), particularly in culture, education, and science. 

The first initiative aimed to bridge the country’s “digital divide” by providing free computer training to 102,697 participants, or 10% of the adult population. And Estonian children are taught computer programming starting at the age of seven. There’s been no looking back. 

In July 2016, 91.4% of Estonians used the Internet, a big jump from 2000, when only 28.6% of the population was connected.

Here are the three most valuable lessons from Estonia’s digital past that all countries can learn from.

Lesson #1: Courageous and patient digital-minded leadership

Naturally, I will start from the ones leading the way. The leadership of a country on the path to digital transformation doesn’t only need to be digital-minded. It also needs to have characteristics that include understanding what digital transformation involves – the courage to experiment and patience to let significant changes occur.

The Development Director at the e-Governance Academy, Hannes Astok, looks back fondly to the experimentation that led to the e-solutions that have become the core components of Estonia’s digital state. “When it came to nationwide ID cards, online tax declaration, or the X-Road, there was no guarantee that any of it would work. However, the courage to experiment was present throughout the entire process,” Astok has said.

The online tax declaration project is an excellent example of the importance of leadership. The Tax Board understood that the potential risks were outweighed by the benefits of correct and timely tax declarations. So they decided to experiment from the digitalization of the system to how they would encourage people to start using the online service.

Lesson #2: Joining public and private sector forces

Leadership isn’t only about the few bright minds at the top. Instead, it is distributed between multiple stakeholders within the public and private sectors. Hence, the second major lesson is connected to combining forces to deliver digital excellence.

In the digital transformation process, courage to experiment, the will and consensus between the public and private sector, and universities are of great importance. In Estonia, there was a mutual acknowledgment of shared responsibility and goals. No one decided to go their way and later blame others when things didn’t work out. Here, data exchange is a great example. 

Lesson #3: Trust and transparency at all levels

Global Affairs Director at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Indrek Õnnik, has said that trust and transparency have had a significant role in Estonia’s digitalization process. At its core, this refers to embedding privacy and security at every stage of technological development.

However, on a more philosophical level, we can also talk about general principles, such as transparency. For instance, Estonia supports the open-source software, and its systems are, by a matter of principle, designed without any backdoors.

Transparency must be upheld even when things start to go down. In August 2017, there was a security weakness incident that affected about 800,000 Estonian ID cards. 

Estonian ID cards are one of the primary means of authentication and electronic signature that over 67% of Estonians use daily. All the agencies involved started immediately to solve this problem, without finding the one who was at fault or hiding anything from the public. Authorities quickly provided the means for the remote renewal of the affected ID cards, out of which half were renewed by the end of the year. 

Looking back, this was undoubtedly the right approach. A few months after the incident, local elections saw the most significant number of i-voters to date. That was one of the indications that people’s trust in the state’s digital infrastructure did not suffer a tremendous hit. It is believed that the authorities’ strategic, transparent, and rapid action played a significant role in maintaining and, in fact, further enhancing the trust of people.