GovTech Maturity Index 2025: What the World Bank’s Latest Snapshot Signals for Public-Sector Digital Markets
The World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI) 2025: Tracking Public Sector Digital Transformation Worldwide offers a structured snapshot of public-sector digital transformation across 197 economies, measured through 48 key indicators spanning core government systems, online public service delivery, digital citizen engagement, and enabling policies and institutions. The brief credits the GTMI team led by João Ricardo Vasconcelos, with Cem Dener, Hubert Nii-Aponsah, Charles Victor Blanco, Arto Juhani Immonen, Per Nordlund, Freida Siregar, and Yunsang Song. Importantly, the GTMI is framed not as a country “ranking,” but as an overview intended to inform digital transformation design and identify gaps and good practices.
The headline finding is progress that is real but uneven. Group A (extensive maturity) now includes 41% of economies, up from 35% in 2022, suggesting upward movement overall while still reflecting bottlenecks to scaling. At the same time, the global “digital divide” is widening: the gap in average GTMI scores between the most mature and least mature groups increased from 0.677 in 2022 to 0.722 in 2025. The report also observes a pronounced income stratification, with most high-income economies in Groups A and B and most low-income economies in Groups C and D.
In core government systems, GTMI 2025 reports notable adoption gains in foundational “shared government” capabilities—government cloud, enterprise architecture, interoperability frameworks, and government service bus platforms—along with continued opportunities in HR and payroll modernization, where fragmentation persists and adoption declined in some economies over the past three years. Public service delivery shows strong uptake in practical transactional services (tax portals, e-filing, e-payments, and customs single windows), and the new indicator on digital ID finds 59% of economies using digital ID for identification and online services. Yet a major service-delivery gap remains: approximately 76 economies—39%—still lack a fully operational online public service portal, and a subset has regressed since 2022.
Digital citizen engagement continues to lag relative to other domains. While more economies report progress in citizen feedback mechanisms and participation platforms, open data and open government portals show maintenance and functionality challenges, and only 31% of economies publish citizen engagement statistics. On the enabling environment, GTMI 2025 notes momentum in digital skills strategies and public sector innovation institutions, growth in digital signature platforms, and increased attention to data governance and privacy. Two new 2025 indicators signal accelerating policy interest: about 45% of economies report AI ethical guidelines and about 42% report “green tech” policies for GovTech, with additional countries developing these policies. However, the report’s updated definition of a whole-of-government approach suggests institutionalization is still uncommon: only 46 economies (23%) meet the threshold tied to enterprise architecture, interoperability frameworks, and shared data exchange platforms.
For federal government contractors, the GTMI’s patterns reinforce several market-relevant realities. First, “platform” modernization—cloud migration, shared services, API-led interoperability, and identity—continues to be the backbone of digital government, creating sustained demand for systems integration, secure data exchange, and governance-heavy delivery models that can scale across agencies and mission owners. Second, the persistent gap in operational service portals underscores that digitization is not merely launching a website, but sustaining resilient, accessible, citizen-centric services—an implementation challenge where contractors’ DevSecOps, UX, and operations capabilities can be decisive. Third, the documented weaknesses in civic tech and measurement point to an expanding requirement for performance management, instrumentation, and transparency-by-design—especially because the report flags inconsistent monitoring and calls for standardized reporting frameworks and metrics. Finally, the rise of AI ethics, privacy, and green GovTech policies suggests a tightening policy perimeter around emerging tech adoption, elevating the value of compliance-ready architectures, auditability, and responsible-AI controls in public-sector procurements.
Disclaimer: This blog post is a high-level summary of a World Bank GTMI 2025 brief and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, procurement advice, or an endorsement of any particular technology or vendor, and it may omit context that matters for specific acquisitions or policy decisions.