Ukraine’s government says almost 18.5 million people had updated the Diia app by December 2022. Read that figure closely. It counts updates, not people who use the app, and the gap between access and use runs through much of the Diia story.
Diia, short for “State and Me,” is a mobile app, a web portal and the brand of Ukraine’s e-government. The Ministry of Digital Transformation presented it on September 27, 2019, and the app launched on February 6, 2020. At the launch President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 9 million Ukrainians now had their driver’s license and car registration on their phones. By the end of 2020 the app had a little over 6 million users and the portal offered 50 services.
What it does
By the government’s own count the app holds 14 digital documents, including the ID card, biometric passport, student card, driver’s license, vehicle registration and tax number, plus 21 services. The portal, which the government put at more than 70 services in its own material and other counts put above 130, handles business registration. Founding a limited liability company takes 30 minutes, and the government says 1 million private entrepreneurs and more than 14,000 companies have used the service.
Parliament voted in March 2021 to make digital identity documents legally equal to physical ones. From August 23 that year, citizens could use digital ID cards and passports for all purposes inside Ukraine. Since 2023 they can register cars in the app too, with plates that start with DI or PD rather than regional codes.
The catch
In September 2024 Diia added online marriage registration, aimed partly at soldiers separated from partners on the front line. In the first month, over 1.1 million Ukrainians tried to make proposals through it. A total of 435 couples married. The service made Time’s list of the best inventions of 2024.
Security is the weak point. In May 2020 data on 26 million driver’s licenses surfaced on the internet. The government said Diia was not linked to the breach, though that is hard to verify, and the country’s data protection rules are described as weak. On the UN’s 2020 e-government index, Ukraine ranked 69th of 193 countries.
Diia City, announced in May 2020, offers IT firms a special tax regime, intellectual property protection and simplified rules. By July 30, 2023, it had more than 600 residents.
At the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said the United States hopes to replicate Diia’s success in other countries.
