Challenge statement
Challenge type: If you are working on multiple challenges, please indicate if this is your "big bet" or "exploratory" challenge.
Please note: we ask you to only submit a maximum of 3 challenges - 1x Big Bet, 2x Exploratory. Each challenge must be submitted individually.
BIG BET
Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)
La transformación digital está transformando el funcionamiento de gobiernos, instituciones y organizaciones, lo que exige no solo mejores infraestructuras y herramientas, sino también cambios profundos en la alfabetización digital, la capacidad institucional y la participación ciudadana. A medida que los gobiernos recurren cada vez más a la toma de decisiones basada en datos, los principios de gobierno abierto y tecnologías emergentes como la IA y la cadena de bloques, el desafío ya no se limita a la adopción, sino a la integración con un propósito.
En Argentina, las brechas digitales persistentes reflejan desigualdades más amplias: sistemas fragmentados, gobernanza de datos deficiente y capacidad pública limitada para implementar, escalar y sostener la innovación digital. Si bien las herramientas digitales están más disponibles que nunca, a menudo no se traducen en servicios públicos eficaces e inclusivos debido a la escasez de habilidades, enfoques aislados y falta de alineación estratégica.
Nuestro objetivo es:
-Fortalecer las capacidades digitales dentro de la Oficina de País y entre los socios gubernamentales, alineando esfuerzos
con prioridades más amplias de sostenibilidad y gobernanza.
-Co-crear soluciones digitales con actores locales (desde ministerios nacionales hasta gobiernos locales y laboratorios de innovación municipales), garantizando que las intervenciones sean técnicamente sólidas y socialmente fundamentadas.
-Promover la alfabetización de datos y la participación cívica, empoderando a los ciudadanos para utilizar los datos de manera significativa y ética.
-Explorar el uso responsable de la IA, la cadena de bloques y la ciencia de datos para la innovación pública, reconociendo al mismo tiempo
y mitigar riesgos como la exclusión, la fragmentación o la vigilancia.
Este desafío es complejo, sistémico y evolutivo. Requiere acciones interconectadas en todos los niveles y una transformación digital que priorice a las personas, fortaleciendo la autonomía, la confianza y la inclusión, a la vez que aborda las necesidades y realidades únicas de cada contexto.
Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?
FONDO
UNDP Argentina has contribute to the digital transformation, combining policy support, experimentation, and capacity building. Over the past few years, our Country Office, and particularly the Co_Lab, have collaborated with diverse actors—from ministries to local governments— to promote inclusive, people-centered approaches to digitalization.
Key milestones include:
Red Con Vos (since 2021): A network of nearby stores promoting digital inclusion, helping
neighbors with their online tasks, along two municipalities. Recognized by the OECD
Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, it became a reference model
adopted by other UNDP Labs. https://www.undp.org/es/argentina/proyectos/little-help-my-neighbors
AI Agenda (since 2023): The Lab has led the AI strategy along with different stakeholders, government agencies, universities, within others, producing research, hosting public seminars, and developing tools to promote responsible, inclusive uses of AI aligned with development goals. https://inteligenciaargentina.org/en/
Internal digital strategy: Within the Country Office, we’ve launched the Digital Fitness Programme (in partnership with the Chief Digital Office) and established a Digital Task Force to strengthen team-wide digital
literacy and foster purposeful experimentation with AI, blockchain, and data-driven decision-making.
Province of Buenos Aires: In partnership with the Ministry of Community Development, we conducted a comprehensive diagnostic of citizen request systems and are now co-designing a One-Stop Digital Request Platform, addressing fragmentation and inefficiencies in public service delivery.
Comodoro Rivadavia (2025): In collaboration with Comodoro Conocimiento and the Health
Secretariat, we are developing a digital tool for HIV prevention and care, rooted in human-centered design. This initiative is part of a broader strategy to localize digital transformation and tackle public health challenges through accessible and sustainable technological solutions.
Citizen empowerment through data: The Contar con Datos challenge promotes data literacy and the use of storytelling to generate public value. The initiative fosters citizen engagement with open datasets, transforming information into insight-driven narratives that can shape public decision-making.
This track record illustrates a strategic evolution—from isolated pilot initiatives to a comprehensive digital
transformation strategy that integrates top-down institutional engagement with bottom-up experimentation alongside communities and local actors. It also highlights a growing internal demand within UNDP and among its partners for capacity building, practical tools, and long-term digital strategies.
Our current challenge is to connect, scale, and consolidate these efforts, moving beyond promising pilots toward sustainable, people-centered digital ecosystems.
Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.
Despite our commitment to digital transformation, significant gaps in digital capacity remain across the Country Office and public sector partners. The UNDP Digital Strategy 2022–2025 notes that most staff lack systematic training in coredigital skills, limiting our ability to support national efforts. This isespecially evident in areas like AI, blockchain, and user-centered digital design. As a result, many innovation initiatives stall due to limited technical follow-up. At the same time, rising internal demand for digital expertise highlights both growing awareness and the urgent need for structured capacity-building.
In the Argentine public sector, structural and systemic challenges are also reflected in quantitative evidence. A 2024 study by CIPPEC, which assessed the digital maturity of municipal governments across 23 provincial capitals, reported an average overall score of 0.55 (on a scale from 0 to 1) for digital public
services. While usability and transactional functionality received relatively higher scores—0.62 and 0.69 respectively—the average for data governance was markedly low, at just 0.34. This highlights the critical underdevelopment of strategic data management practices at the local level. The study also revealed that only two-thirds of the municipalities surveyed had established any kind of local regulatory framework for digital policy. The remaining third operated under provincial or national laws, lacking local norms to guide key areas such as artificial intelligence, data ethics, or open data strategy.
At the national level, the scale of fragmentation is equally pronounced. In 2019, the Auditor General’s Office (AGN) reported that Argentina’s federal public administration was operating with 2,781 distinct IT systems across ministries and agencies. This level of technological disintegration significantly limits interoperability, causes duplication of data and effort, and hampers both service delivery and monitoring. The shortage of technical talent further compounds these challenges. Many municipalities report chronic difficulties in recruiting and retaining professionals with expertise in areas such as programming, data analysis, and digital infrastructure. Public sector salaries are often uncompetitive, and structured training or upskilling opportunities for existing staff are scarce. Although some local governments have started to build informal partnerships with universities and tech organizations, these remain isolated efforts rather than part of a coherent national strategy.
Taken together, these quantitative indicators paint a picture of a public sector that, while increasingly aware of the need for digital transformation, still lacks the institutional scaffolding, human resources, and regulatory frameworks necessary to implement it at scale. This Action Plan is built precisely to respond to these limitations, working to close capacity gaps through a combination of internal development, strategic partnerships, and context-sensitive, people-centered innovation.
Qualitative evidence: What weak signals have you recently spotted that characterizes its urgency? Please provide qualitative information that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge. You can add text, a link, or a picture.
In addition to quantitative indicators, qualitative evidence gathered through fieldwork, interviews, and diagnostic processes reinforces the urgency and complexity of Argentina’s digital transformation challenges. These insights reveal not only structural and technological barriers, but also deeply rooted institutional and cultural dynamics that shape the country’s capacity to adopt and sustain digital innovation.
At the national level, research by organizations such as Fundar has shown that Argentina lacks centralized leadership for data governance and maintains no comprehensive inventory of public datasets. This results in significant ambiguity regarding which institutions produce specific data, how it is used, and under what standards. Even as transparency initiatives have led to the publication of open datasets, there are few institutional mechanisms in place to guarantee data quality, ensure interoperability, or promote strategic use. The absence of a national data strategy and formal governance frameworks severely limits the public sector’s ability to leverage information as a tool for innovation and decision-making.
These challenges are mirrored—and often magnified—at the local level. Interviews conducted by CIPPEC with municipal officials reveal a widespread lack of coordination between departments, with most operating on isolated digital systems that do not share taxonomies, data models, or workflows. In practice, this results in fragmented service delivery, where citizens are forced to repeat procedures and information cannot be efficiently reused across agencies. Municipalities also report a persistent scarcity of technical personnel, particularly in areas like data science, software development, and AI application. The difficulty in hiring and retaining talent is exacerbated by low public sector salaries, limited career development opportunities, and a lack of internal training programs. While some local governments have begun to partner with universities or the private sector to address these issues, such initiatives tend to be informal and short-term, rather than part of institutional strategies.
A concrete example of these limitations comes from the Province of Buenos Aires. Between September and November 2024, UNDP’s Accelerator Lab partnered with the Ministry of Community Development to conduct an in-depth assessment of its citizen request management system. Through interviews with front-desk staff, call center operators, social workers, request coordinators, and high-level officials, the diagnostic uncovered a highly fragmented structure. Different teams handled citizen requests independently, with little coordination, no shared protocols, and minimal use of integrated digital tools. Communication between teams often relied on informal channels such as WhatsApp or personal email accounts, raising concerns about data privacy and operational accountability. Many processes were tracked manually using outdated formats like Excel spreadsheets, making it difficult to monitor requests, follow up on unresolved issues, or analyze patterns to inform policy.
These qualitative findings reveal that Argentina’s digital gaps are not only technical, but deeply institutional and cultural. They reflect a broader need for trust-building, organizational redesign, and human-centered innovation. By grounding our action plan in this firsthand understanding of how systems actually operate, we aim to co-create digital transformation strategies that are not only technically sound, but also socially embedded and operationally sustainable.
Ruiz Nicolini, J. P., Kunst, M., & Dias, J. M. (2024). Usos inteligentes de datos en el Estado. Fundar.
Luvini, P. (2023, 27 de septiembre). Datos y políticas públicas. Fundar.
Luvini, P., Dias, J. M., Kunst, M., Ruiz Nicolini, J. P., & Yankelevich, D. (2023, 30 de octubre). Una
estrategia de datos para la Administración Pública Nacional. Fundar.
González Chmielewski, D. y Peralta, A. (julio de 2024). Transformación pública digital: la agenda municipal. Documento de Políticas Públicas N°246. Buenos Aires: CIPPEC.
OECD (2019), Digital Government Review of Argentina: Accelerating the
Digitalisation of the Public Sector, OECD Digital Government Studies, OECD
Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/354732cc-en.
Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?
Our approach to digital transformation is rooted in a clear, people-centered value proposition: to reduce the digital divide not only by improving access to technology, but by strengthening human and institutional capacities, fostering public trust, and ensuring that digital tools are embedded in strategies that are inclusive, sustainable, and locally relevant.
Rather than treating digitalization as a purely technical challenge, we see it as a cross-cutting enabler of systemic change—one that must be shaped by local knowledge, co-created with diverse actors, and driven by the specific needs and realities of those it aims to serve. This is why our strategy combines both top-down and bottom-up approaches. At the institutional level, we work to align digital transformation with broader governance and sustainability priorities, providing governments with the tools, insights, and support needed to modernize services, enhance accountability, and strengthen resilience. At the grassroots level, we engage directly with civil society, local innovation labs, and frontline staff to co-design solutions that are both technically feasible and socially grounded.
Internally, we are building digital capacity within the UNDP Country Office through structured training programs, knowledge-sharing initiatives, and active experimentation with emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, and data science. These efforts aim to position our teams as reliable partners for government counterparts navigating their own digital transitions.
Externally, our work spans from redesigning citizen request systems in the Province of Buenos Aires, to supporting the creation of digital health tools in Comodoro Rivadavia, to promoting data literacy and civic participation through storytelling challenges like “Contar con Datos.” In each case, we combine policy expertise, service design, and inclusive innovation to produce solutions that are scalable, ethical, and responsive to real-world complexity.
It is important to highlight that we are also mindful of the other side of digitalization—the unintended consequences that can emerge in increasingly digital societies. In parallel to this action plan, through our resilience agenda, we are exploring how digital tools and platforms may exacerbate challenges such as unwanted loneliness, social fragmentation, or reduced access for those excluded from digital systems. As we promote digital transformation, we are committed to doing so responsibly—ensuring that the solutions we co-create do not deepen inequalities or create new vulnerabilities. By integrating this perspective into our work, we aim to foster a more holistic, ethical, and human-centered approach to digitalization.
Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?
Digital transformation needs both top-down strategy & bottom-up action. By building digital skills, promoting data use & advancing responsible AI, we can bridge gaps, fuel public innovation & ensure no one is left behind. #DigitalInclusion #AIforGood #PublicInnovation
Learning questions
Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?
How can we strengthen digital capacities in governments and communities in ways that not only transfer skills, but also build trust, shift mindsets, and enable meaningful use of tools like open data and artificial intelligence?
How can we harness the benefits of digitalization while also identifying and mitigating its potential harms—such as social exclusion, surveillance, fragmentation, or loss of access for vulnerable groups?
What does it take to embed digital innovation into public institutions in a way that is resilient, context-sensitive, and aligned with long-term development goals?
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Explore, Test, Grow
Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
La Inteligencia Colectiva nos ayudará a recopilar información de funcionarios públicos, ciudadanos y expertos técnicos para comprender mejor las necesidades reales, las brechas digitales y los riesgos sociales. Este método garantiza que las soluciones se basen en la experiencia vivida e incluyan múltiples perspectivas.
La creación rápida de prototipos nos permitirá probar herramientas digitales a pequeña escala o intervenciones de desarrollo de capacidades con la población local.
Socios, como gobiernos municipales o laboratorios. Estas iteraciones rápidas generarán aprendizaje práctico y detectarán obstáculos en las primeras etapas del proceso.
Se utilizará el pensamiento de futuro para explorar las implicaciones a largo plazo de la transformación digital, incluyendo la gobernanza de tecnologías emergentes como la IA y la cadena de bloques. La planificación de escenarios respaldará decisiones estratégicas resilientes y con fundamento ético.
Los modelos de colaboración de datos nos ayudarán a estructurar alianzas en torno al intercambio y análisis de datos. Estos modelos mejorarán nuestra capacidad para extraer información útil, evaluar el impacto y codiseñar.
Estrategias de IA responsables con las partes interesadas.
Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
Through a combination of stakeholder mapping, interviews, and participatory workshops, we gathered insights from institutional actors, frontline workers, and community members—building a more complete, experience-based evidence base. This approach helped uncover not only operational gaps, but also cultural dynamics, levels of digital literacy, and user expectations, which are often invisible in traditional assessments.
In the Province of Buenos Aires, we partnered with the Ministry of Community Development to conduct a deep diagnostic of its citizen request management system. Through interviews with senior officials, case coordinators, call center operators, social workers, and administrative staff, we identified critical fragmentation in workflows, the widespread use of informal coordination tools (such as spreadsheets, WhatsApp, or personal emails), and the absence of standardized protocols or traceability mechanisms. These insights provided a clearer understanding of the institutional barriers to digitalization, as well as the internal capacities and motivation that could be leveraged to support change.
In Comodoro Rivadavia, we are applying a similar methodology, engaging with a diverse group of municipal actors—including teams from digital government, health, gender, diversity, and social inclusion areas—alongside members of the innovation lab Comodoro Conocimiento. We are going to conduct interviews with civil society organizations and citizens to understand their experiences with access to digital services, especially in the context of sexual and reproductive health, HIV prevention, and public trust. The participatory mapping of stakeholders and systems revealed both infrastructural and relational barriers to digital access, while also highlighting opportunities for collaboration and innovation from within the local ecosystem.
Together, these new sources of data not only revealed what is not working, but also helped identify where change is already possible, and how digital transformation can be approached in ways that are more inclusive, contextualized, and human-centered.
9Industry, innovation and infrastructure
10Reduced innequalities
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