The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is seeking a P2.7-billion budget for its e-government program next year to expand the country’s digital infrastructure.

Speaking on the sidelines of the eGovPH Hackathon on Tuesday, DICT Undersecretary for e-Government David Almirol Jr. said the proposed budget will fund cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, platform integration, and in-house developers retention. 

Of the total, P800 million is earmarked for the continuous enhancement and maintenance of the eGovPH Super App.

“The overall estimate, including cloud, sustainability, and the like, is around P2.7 billion,” Almirol said. “We can see that digitalization doesn’t actually need to be expensive. If you know how to optimize and avoid repeating processes and systems, it will really come in under budget.”

Almirol said the department is also opening the platform to the local technology community as demand for digital government services continues to grow.

“We can no longer handle everything alone. There needs to be someone to sustain what we’ve started, or else everything we built will just crumble,” he said. “We want the IT community to help us enhance this, strengthen security, and review the architecture.”

The eGovPH app, the government’s one-stop digital platform, has recorded 61 million downloads and more than 900 million transactions. It now integrates 1,332 government e-services across 95 service modules.

Almirol said the government’s digitalization drive stems from the national directive to make public services more accessible.

The DICT also reported that its eGov Data Exchange Platform has processed more than 950 million transactions, while over 92 million Digital National IDs have been issued, supporting more than 300 million digital identity transactions through eVerify. 

Its eGovAI platform has likewise surpassed 200 million transactions and 10 million users.