Government of Venezuela: do not attempt to digitize all sectors at once

The 2nd Global Digital Forum will serve as a venue where experts from 120 countries can share their experiences and discuss the most effective solutions for digitalization and the adoption of information technology. Ahead of GDF 2026, the Ministry of Popular Power for Science and Technology of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela shared its vision for the country’s digital development.

For Venezuela, a robust digital governance architecture is built on four priority pillars:

• Decentralized interoperability: instead of exchanging centralized databases, institutions utilize a secure, structured data bus to exchange encrypted information through APIs.
• Universal and immutable digital identity: a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) digital signature tied to an identity document or legal entity registration.
• The “once-only” principle: the state never requests data or a document that another government agency already holds.
• “Sovereign cloud” services for the Venezuelan state: all Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models are hosted and utilized on hardware and software located within Venezuelan borders.

Trends in IT and e-public services in Venezuela

In the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the information technology ecosystem is characterized by the need to transition from a paper-based bureaucracy to flexible digital environments adapted to the current legal framework, such as the Law on the Digital State and the Organic Law for the Streamlining and Optimization of Administrative Procedures.

The main technology trends being applied in the public and private sectors are e-government interoperability, payments and fintech services (interbank interaction), and hybrid cloud architectures (SUTI).

1. Interoperability and integration of central registries: the gradual introduction of data exchange mechanisms through web services (REST/SOAP) to connect Venezuela to a robust digital governance architecture built on three priority pillars.
2. Decentralized interoperability: Instead of exchanging centralized databases, institutions utilize a secure, structured data bus to exchange encrypted information through APIs.
3. Universal and immutable digital identity: a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) digital signature tied to a citizen’s identity document or legal entity registration.
4. The “once-only” principle: the state never requests data or a document that another government agency already holds.
5. Interoperability and integration of central registries: the gradual introduction of data exchange mechanisms through web services (REST/SOAP) to connect the national public administration (Commercial Registry, identification, and taxes) in order to avoid repeated requests for documents.
6. Digital identity and centralized authentication systems: the creation of single credentials linked to the Unified Tax Information Registry (RIF) and the identity document for access to government platforms.
7. Fintech modernization and integration of payment gateways: the large-scale integration of electronic payment channels (Pago Móvil, C2P, B2P, and crypto assets) into virtual payment portals for the collection of taxes and municipal fees.
8. Migration of national information services to the state’s sovereign cloud (Public/Private Cloud): the gradual transfer of legacy data centers running proprietary software to the state’s “sovereign cloud,” which guarantees data sovereignty, high availability, and reduced risk from power and telecommunications outages.
9. Cybersecurity and data protection: the introduction of certified digital signature schemes (SUSCERTE resolutions) and security audits when storing digitized public documents.

Priority areas of digitization and digital transformation

To achieve meaningful simplification of procedures, digital transformation efforts in Venezuela are focused on the following key areas:

A. Hubs for administrative procedures and the simplification of administration

• Digitization of the commercial and civil registry (SAREN): full automation of the issuance of incorporation documents, document legalization, and direct digital signatures for entrepreneurs and companies.
• Tax and customs simplification (SENIAT): self-service portals for filing declarations, withholding national taxes, or obtaining tax exemptions, with automatic verification through interagency interoperability.

B. Digital identity and a single digital signature

• Introduction of a digital ID card: the creation of an interoperable architecture that enables real-time identity verification without physical copies or stamped paper.
• Democratizing the electronic signature: the introduction of accessible digital certificates backed by authorized certification service providers.

C. Digitization of municipal services and local fees

• Integrated municipal tax management systems: the unification of procedures for industrial and trade patents, municipal real estate, and business licensing through centralized cloud platforms.
• Interactive digital cadaster: GIS (geographic information systems) mapping for territorial management and effective tax collection at the local level.

D. Efficient management of government services and digital healthcare

• Automation of export-import procedures: the digitization of sanitary, phytosanitary, and foreign trade authorization documentation through transactional “single window platforms.”
• Unified medical record (public healthcare): the gradual digitization of a citizen’s health history, ensuring compatibility across the public healthcare system and social security agencies.

Proposed implementation roadmap

1. Enshrine the “once-only” principle: prohibit by law any administrative body from requiring photocopies of an identity document, a printed RIF, or documents issued by another government agency.
2. Deploy the National Interoperability Bus (AN-Interop): implement a secure middleware layer for microservice exchange among tax-collecting, identification, and registration agencies.
3. Audit processes before digitization: do not automate bureaucracy. Eliminate 50% of redundant steps or requirements before writing the first line of code for a web-based procedure.

National information and communications technology plan

• Venezuela’s information and communications technology (ICT) development is guided by the National telecommunications Plan 2025-2031, which sets out a roadmap for the country’s digital transformation and technological sovereignty. The plan provides a strategic framework for modernizing the nation’s technology infrastructure, ensuring universal access to telecommunications services, and eliminating areas with limited or no connectivity.
• The plan prioritizes digital sovereignty and the development of IXP Venezuela (Internet Exchange Points). It also focuses on expanding fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks to support the gradual deployment of 5G technology through public-private partnerships, with the goal of increasing data transmission speeds and improving service reliability.

As part of the national strategy, these technologies are being applied primarily to modernize essential public services:

• Education: Digitization efforts focus primarily on connecting educational institutions, including secondary schools and universities, to high-speed fiber-optic networks. This infrastructure is intended to provide students, teachers, and academic staff with equal access to the internet while supporting the development of digital learning platforms, interactive educational content, and virtual classrooms. Priority is also given to promoting technology adoption and continuing education programs for students and teaching staff, helping bridge the digital divide and integrate ICT skills at every level of education, from primary school through university.
• Healthcare: The focus is on modernizing the technology infrastructure of hospitals and primary care facilities through dedicated network connectivity. These improvements support the gradual introduction of telemedicine, making remote consultations and diagnostic services more accessible in hard-to-reach areas. Additional initiatives include digitizing medical records and integrating management systems to improve medical supply inventory management and streamline operations across the public healthcare system.

As the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela advances its digital transformation, the rapid adoption of information technologies serves a strategic objective: increasing national productivity, stimulating trade, and removing bureaucratic barriers that drive up costs across the real economy.

Priorities for digital transformation should be determined not by the technological complexity of individual industries, but by their impact on everyday economic transactions, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and the country’s ability to attract investment.

The three priority areas are:

1. Foreign trade and industry
2. Agribusiness and food security
3. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

1) Foreign trade, logistics, and customs:

• Challenge: Obtaining import and export permits remains a major operational bottleneck.

• Solution: Introduce an integrated digital Foreign Trade Single Window (VUCE). Automating the issuance of export licenses, phytosanitary certificates (INSAI), quality permits (SENCAMER), and customs clearance procedures could reduce processing times from weeks to hours.

2) Agribusiness and supply chains:

• Challenge: Transporting agricultural products requires waybills and permits from multiple government agencies, creating administrative barriers that disrupt distribution across the country.

• Solution: Introduce a unified digital waybill system with QR codes and automated shipment tracking to eliminate redundant administrative checks and paper-based permits.

3) Banking, financial services, and FinTech:

• Challenge: Despite the success of Pago Móvil, further integration is needed between private and state-owned banks and national and municipal tax collection systems to enable real-time transactions.

• Solution: Establish interoperability through open banking APIs, allowing businesses and individuals to pay taxes, utility bills, and business licensing fees automatically and seamlessly.

4) Hydrocarbons, petrochemicals, and energy:

• Challenge: Improving industrial supply chain management, streamlining environmental permitting, and strengthening oversight of state-owned assets.

• Solution: Integrate Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) platforms with government management systems to improve transparency in the distribution of energy resources and industrial materials.

Priority areas for initial implementation

Rather than attempting to digitize all sectors simultaneously, it is necessary to begin with establishing the core enabling technologies that will serve as the foundation for sector-specific digital services. In Venezuela, the following four tiers should be prioritized for initial implementation and further development:

Tier D: Citizen services (healthcare, trade, and exports)

Tier C: Administrative procedures and taxation (SAREN, SENIAT, and municipal authorities)

Tier B: Interoperability bus (data exchange and coordination between government agencies)

Tier A: Digital identity and electronic signature (SAIME, SUSCERTE, and RIF)

Area 1: Digital identity and unified authentication (starting point)

• Why it comes first: Without a reliable way to verify the identity of individuals and businesses online, remote transactions cannot be conducted securely or be legally valid.

• Implementation: Develop a Single Sign-On (SSO) system for Venezuelan government services that integrates national identification data with the Tax Information Registry (RIF). The next step would be to introduce digital signature certificates (SUSCERTE) that can be used directly on mobile phones, eliminating the need for physical security tokens.

Area 2: Business registration, property records, and notarial services (business environment)

• Why it matters: To encourage businesses to enter the formal economy and reduce the size of the informal sector, registering a company or amending its articles of association should take minutes rather than months.

• Implementation: Develop SAREN Digital into a fully automated platform, incorporating standardized articles of association, remote verification of company capital, and online access to property registry records.

Area 3: Taxes and municipal fees (tax administration efficiency)

• Why it matters: Streamlining tax collection by local and national authorities while reducing arbitrary practices in payment processing.

• Implementation: Integrate municipal tax portals through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms hosted in the government cloud, eliminating duplicate forms.

Area 4: Document legalization, apostilles, and consular services

• Why it matters: These services directly affect Venezuelans living abroad, as well as the international mobility of professionals, businesses, and investors who need their Venezuelan documents recognized in other countries.

• Implementation: Expand the use of fully digital electronic apostilles with QR-code verification and electronic signatures, eliminating the need for in-person visits and third-party intermediaries.

Implementation matrix: what should be done first?

1. Foundation phase (months 1–6): updating the Law on Electronic Access to and Exchange of Data, Information and Documents among State Bodies and Institutions (better known in Venezuela as the Interoperability Law), plus establishing a unified standard for mobile digital signatures, plus implementing a government data exchange bus.

2. Core transformation phase (months 6–18): making SAREN fully digital for company formation, plus establishing a Single Window for Foreign Trade (VUCE), plus standardizing digital payments for local taxes.

3. Sectoral integration phase (18+ months): implementing agro-industrial traceability, plus developing digital health services, plus establishing a unified, end-to-end system for citizen identification.

The use and development of AI technologies in Venezuela is becoming an increasingly significant component of the government’s digital agenda, driven by the development of public policy measures and sovereign infrastructure.

In the area of strategic infrastructure and technological sovereignty, the Ministry of Popular Power for Science and Technology (MINCYT) is promoting the development of domestic capabilities centered on a sovereign AI model through the Great Mission for Science, Technology, and Innovation. This strategy encompasses not only research, development, and the implementation of applied projects in this field, but also the creation of international technology partnerships for data modeling and the deployment of platforms adapted to the country’s realities and priorities.

In the area of public administration and support for the civil service, systems based on large language models (LLMs) are being developed and deployed for document analysis, report generation, dashboard creation and automated summaries, semantic text analysis, automated presentation generation, evidence-based decision-making, and a range of other tools designed to improve the efficiency of public administration.

In risk management and emergency response, AI models are used to prevent, monitor, and assess damage resulting from natural disasters and other emergencies. Of particular importance is the processing of satellite data and drone imagery using deep-learning algorithms to produce georeferenced maps of critical infrastructure following seismic events or heavy rainfall. These tools also strengthen early hydrometeorological warning systems and provide analytical information to civil protection and public security authorities, helping optimize decision-making and accelerate response efforts on the ground.

In education and professional training, efforts are underway to integrate AI tools into the national education system in order to create adaptive learning content and improve teacher training. Subjects and workshops covering computational thinking, data science, and the ethical foundations of AI are also being introduced, from secondary school through university level. A notable initiative in this area is the National Network for the Development of Sovereign and Secure Software (S3), which offers specialized training and free-software training pathways in software development, artificial intelligence, and information security. There is also the Prisma online platform, which focuses on educating the general public and young people about emerging technologies such as AI. The Dr. Humberto Fernández-Morán National University of Sciences, for its part, is the only university in Venezuela offering undergraduate degree programs in data science, cybersecurity engineering, artificial intelligence engineering, and robotics and automation engineering.

In addition, work is underway in the healthcare sector to incorporate AI models as decision-support tools for doctors in diagnosis. This includes both medical-image analysis and the review and analysis of patients’ clinical histories, enabling doctors not only to monitor patients’ treatment and medical history, but also to analyze test results and perform computer-assisted diagnostic assessments.

Nevertheless, it is clear that in some areas the use of AI-based tools remains at an early stage, leaving considerable room for improvement. These include banking and the use of such technologies in financial operations and analysis; the automated and intelligent management of government procedures; traffic and incident management by city and regional authorities; and transportation logistics operations (food, goods, and other types of cargo). All of these potential applications are currently being studied with the aim of developing solutions and services capable of addressing each of these areas comprehensively – not only by providing the necessary digital infrastructure, but also by incorporating the related intelligence layer needed to achieve this goal.

From the perspective of applications in the private sector, we observe that most activity is concentrated on the use of foreign (and therefore non-sovereign) AI tools aimed at automating administrative processes, customer service (such as chatbots, call centers, and other applications), digital marketing, and social media management. The automated generation of content in the form of text, images, audio, or video appears to be the primary application in this sector, reflecting businesses’ needs to advertise and market their products.

Taking the experience of the e-Estonia initiative as a point of reference, where infrastructure is understood to include not merely cables and servers but also a layer of digital trust (Trust Infrastructure), Venezuela is facing key structural challenges across five critical dimensions:

1. Infrastructure and telecommunications challenges (physical layer)

• The connectivity gap and territorial inequality: Although fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment has grown rapidly in key urban centers, pockets of unconnected communities persist in rural and interior areas of the country, giving rise to the digital access divide.
• Energy resilience of the network: The uninterrupted operation of government data centers and telecommunications infrastructure requires sustained investment in backup power and passive emergency measures to avoid e-Gov service outages during national power grid fluctuations.
• Modernization of the long-distance and national backbone network: Interregional interconnection needs to be optimized through agreements on the shared use of transport infrastructure to avoid inefficient duplication and reduce latency.

2. Technology architecture and interoperability issues (logical layer)

• Fragmentation of data storage systems: Many government agencies operate isolated platforms that do not communicate with one another. There is no national interoperability bus (akin to Estonia’s X-Road) based on a common standard for secure APIs.
• A unified digital identity system and digital signature: Relying on a username and password for every portal is not enough. The objective is to deploy a public key infrastructure (PKI) scheme that is accessible via a mobile phone, authenticated in real time against a database of the citizen’s personal data, and certified by SUSCERTE.
• Migration from legacy systems: Much of public administration runs on unstructured databases or outdated software, which hinders the seamless automation of procedures through microservices.

3. Institutional, legal, and regulatory challenges (governance)

• Overcoming superficial digitization: There is a tendency to turn a paper procedure into a PDF file (which is not digital transformation but rather “bureaucracy on a screen”). The goal is to redesign processes to handle structured data rather than mere digitized documents.
• Effectiveness of the “once-only” principle: Although the regulatory framework (e.g., the Law on the Digital State and the Organic Law for the Streamlining and Optimization of Administrative Procedures) promotes efficiency, there is a lack of enforcement mechanisms that would legally prohibit a government institution from requiring physical documents issued by another agency within the same state.
• Data management and cybersecurity: There is an absence of a comprehensive personal data protection framework that would clearly regulate how the state stores, processes, and protects a citizen’s information in a public or private cloud environment.
• Adoption of a new legal framework for ICT governance: There is an urgent need to update the Law on the Digital State and to adopt new laws governing artificial intelligence, digital rights, and telecommunications.

4. Human capital and digital culture issues (social layer)

• The IT brain drain and retention challenges: The public sector faces high turnover as developers, network engineers, and cybersecurity experts move to the private or international sectors, making it difficult to support large-scale technology projects.
• Digital literacy and the second-level digital divide: Computer skills vary substantially across the population. Digital government interfaces must be accessible on basic smartphones (Mobile-First) and function reliably on limited-bandwidth networks.

Additional Challenges

• The digital transformation process and the deployment of digital infrastructure face a host of multidimensional challenges that determine the pace and equity of technological advancement, ranging from basic infrastructure factors to economic variables and human talent.
• High capital and investment requirements pose a significant economic barrier to upgrading the technology base. Deploying connectivity, installing data centers that meet international redundancy standards, and performing preventive maintenance on extensive fiber-optic networks require continuous financial inflows. This necessitates financial sustainability models that balance service tariffs, users’ ability to pay, and incentives for both public and private investment.
• Furthermore, AI models require advanced data centers equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) or specialized accelerators, which entail massive capital expenditures. Additionally, the shortage of large-scale, structured, standardized, and representative data is a key limiting factor for algorithm development. The prevalence of administrative processes reliant on paper or unconnected legacy systems impedes the training of models adapted to the country’s economic, linguistic, and social reality, creating the risk of importing distorted information or models trained on foreign realities. Combined with limited interoperability between institutions, organizations, and companies, as well as the absence of a culture of storing, cleaning, and sharing data, this represents a significant hurdle that remains to be addressed as part of the country’s digital transformation.
• Moreover, the availability and retention of highly skilled personnel are critical to the sustainability of these projects. The management, support, and development of advanced architectures, including cybersecurity, cloud environments, and artificial intelligence models, require professionals with advanced technical expertise. Consequently, continuous professional development, updating higher education curricula, and stemming the brain drain of engineers constitute priority areas for ensuring the country’s technological autonomy.