Governments are increasingly dependent on digital technologies, yet people with the necessary digital skills in the halls of public administration tend to be few and far between. Bureaucratic inertia, convoluted systems, and troves of unstructured data often hinder progress, while an (over)reliance on private vendors leaves many governments locked into costly and rigid arrangements. This challenge is particularly stark in developing countries.

Gartner Research estimated that in 2024 governments’ spending on technology would amount to over $800 billion, but nearly 90 percent of this is concentrated in richer economies serving just 2.5 billion people. The remaining 5.5 billion would be spread across 160 other countries to achieve digital transformation with a fraction of the resources. Doing more with less demands innovation, collaboration, more local capacity and a shift to digital systems that can be re-used rather than endlessly reinvented.

Today, the open-source movement —once confined to hobbyist programmers— is reshaping how some countries approach digital transformation. Open-source technologies offer governments a powerful tool to increase transparency, collaboration and avoid private sector dependency (also known as vendor lock-in). By providing the source code, open-source solutions let governments peek under the hood of their digital systems. This gives them more ownership, greater control and adaptability—and, in turn, enhances national development pathways.  

Committed to expanding choices for countries, UNDP has embedded open source both into its organizational strategy and country guidance. UNDP is also part of the United Nations’ internal and emerging open-source community and is developing proprietary open-source solutions and digital public goods (DPGs). However, in some domains, high-quality open-source solutions are scarce, and in other contexts, proprietary software is equally, if not more, suitable.  

Open source is part of the digital toolbox that exists across several public and private organizations. However, an underlying challenge for many governments is that knowing how to use it—and how to collaborate with open-source communities—requires expertise that many government institutions lack. With these challenges becoming even more evident among countries just starting their digital transformation journeys, UNDP recognizes the need to get to the next phase of the open-source movement, particularly focused on institutionalizing open practices and know-how within governments to improve and sustain public service delivery.