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South African-European Union Dialogue Facility Series

§ 92% of people aged 16 to 74 have inter- tially a for-life email address used for communication.
acted online with public authorities within The mandatory Digital Post is a service offered to cit-
the past 12 months of the publication of the izens from the age of 15 and has a 93.8% coverage
data. of the Danish population or some 4.5 million citizens.

Recent figures from the Agency for Digitisation, a According to one of the presentations shared with
key player in the process under Denmark’s Ministry South Africans at the South Africa-Denmark Dia-
of Finance, show that as many as 5.2 million Danes logue, a total of 227.3 million messages were sent
visited the Danish Citizen Portal (borger.dk), with a during the course of 2021 - translating to a sizeable
satisfaction survey showing a positive 92% in terms number of trees saved and a lot of money too! While
of user-experience early in 2022. The backbone of there might be a lot of positives, the digital mail proj-
the county’s digital infrastructure is the national elec- ect has been criticised for failing to include the most
tronic ID system that is used to authenticate citizens’ vulnerable groups in society, such as senior citizens.
access to public services and information online in Moreover, the system’s costs have been higher than
real-time without having to visit a government office planned, with correspondingly lower savings than ex-
account. Moreover, the same electronic ID system pected.
with a single login and password is used to access
private sector services such as banking and other on- Digital governance
line transactions. Digital governance is key to the digital transforma-
tion journey. Defined as formalised lines of account-
Digital “letter-box” ability and demarcation of roles and responsibilities
Invented in the 1850s, the post-box, as one of the rel- among an array of stakeholders, digital governance
ics of the industrial age, has also gone through a 21 is a mission-critical factor in the modernisation of the
st
century digital makeover. The Danish government has delivery of public services. Although small in popula-
substituted the paper-intensive and environmentally tion and geography, Denmark has a complex political
unfriendly tradition of communicating with citizens and administrative system that spans state, regional
via posted letters. Linked to the national electronic ID and municipal boundaries. In practice, the country’s
system, each citizen has a digital “letter-box”, essen- ambitious digitalisation strategies required high levels

SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW | Volume 15 • No. 1 of 2022 17