Deepening Government Use of AI and E-Government Transition in Latin America: 2024 in Review

Policies aimed at fostering digital government processes are gaining traction in Latin America, at local and regional levels. While these initiatives can streamline access to public services, it can also make them less accessible, less clear, and put people's fundamental rights at risk. As we move forward, we must emphasize transparency and privacy guarantees during government digital transition processes.

Regional Approach to Digitalization 

In November, the Ninth Ministerial Conference on the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean approved the 2026 Digital Agenda for the region (eLAC 2026). This initiative unfolds within the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a regional cooperation forum focused on furthering the economic development of LAC countries.

One of the thematic pillars of eLAC 2026 is the digital transformation of the State, including the digitalization of government processes and services to improve efficiency, transparency, citizen participation, and accountability. The digital agenda also aims to improve digital identity systems to facilitate access to public services and promote cross-border digital services in a framework of regional integration. In this context, the agenda points out countries’ willingness to implement policies that foster information-sharing, ensuring privacy, security, and interoperability in government digital systems, with the goal of using and harnessing data for decision-making, policy design and governance.

This regional process reflects and feeds country-level initiatives that have also gained steam in Latin America in the last few years. The incentives to government digital transformation take shape against the backdrop of improving government efficiency. It is critical to qualify what efficiency means in practice. Often “efficiency” has meant budget cuts or shrinking access to public processes and benefits at the expense of fundamental rights. The promotion of fundamental rights should guide a State’s metrics as to what is efficient and successful. 

As such, while digitalization can play an important role in streamlining access to public services and facilitating the enjoyment of rights, it can also make it more complex for people to access these same services and generally interact with the State. The most vulnerable are those in greater need for that interaction to work well and those with an unusual context that often is not accommodated by the technology being used. They are also the population most prone to having scarce access to digital technologies and limited digital skills.

In addition, whereas properly integrating digital technologies into government processes and routines carries the potential to enhance transparency and civic participation, this is not a guaranteed outcome. It requires government willingness and policies oriented to these goals. Otherwise, digitalization can turn into an additional layer of complexity and distance between citizens and the State. Improving transparency and participation involves conceiving people not only as users of government services, but as participants in the design and implementation of public polices, which includes the ones related to States’ digital transition.  

Leveraging digital identity and data-interoperability systems are generally treated as a natural part of government digitalization plans. Yet, they should be taken with care. As we have highlighted, effective and robust data privacy safeguards do not necessarily come along with states’ investments in implementing these systems, despite the fact they can be expanded into a potential regime of unprecedented data tracking. Among other recommendations and redlines, it’s crucial to support each person’s right to choose to continue using physical documentation instead of going digital.

This set of concerns stresses the importance of having an underlying institutional and normative structure to uphold fundamental rights within digital transition processes. Such a structure involves solid transparency and data privacy guarantees backed by equipped and empo