The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication hosted a high-level Somali delegation led by Abdiwali Ali Abdulle, Director General of Somalia’s National Identification and Registration Authority, alongside key representatives from the United Nations Development Programme and NADRA, for a Peer Learning Mission focused on Foundational Identity Systems and Digital Public Infrastructure. The visit reflects Pakistan’s growing recognition as a reference model for developing nations seeking to build national digital identity and public service delivery infrastructure, with Pakistan’s own journey from paper-based identity systems to one of the world’s most extensive biometric databases offering lessons directly applicable to countries at earlier stages of the same transformation.
The session at the Ministry provided the Somali delegation with a comprehensive overview of Pakistan’s digital transformation architecture through presentations and briefings from its core institutional actors. Pakistan Digital Authority presented on the Digital Nation Pakistan framework, the National Data Exchange Layer, digital sovereignty strategy, and cross-government integration infrastructure. The National Information Technology Board showcased its role in developing citizen-facing e-government platforms and the PEMRA complaint system, alongside broader federal digitization initiatives. The Digital Economy Enhancement Project, the World Bank-funded programme focused on accelerating Pakistan’s transition to a digital economy, contributed context on the programmatic and financing frameworks underpinning Pakistan’s digital infrastructure investments.
The discussions were further enriched by presentations from Ignite, the National Technology Fund, which highlighted its role in nurturing public-private innovation in the technology sector, PSEB, which presented on Pakistan’s software export growth and the talent development ecosystem that underlies it, and the National Telecommunication Corporation, which briefed on secure e-governance infrastructure and government communications. For Somalia, a country actively working to establish a functional national identification system with UNDP support, exposure to Pakistan’s end-to-end digital identity architecture, which spans biometric registration through NADRA, identity verification for digital services, and integration with financial and social protection systems, provides a practical reference point grounded in implementation experience at national scale rather than theoretical frameworks. The Peer Learning Mission format, facilitated by UNDP as a knowledge partner, reflects a growing trend of South-South knowledge exchange in digital governance, with Pakistan increasingly positioned as an exporter of digital infrastructure expertise to countries navigating similar development challenges across Africa and Asia.
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