This week, World Bank leadership flew to Belgrade for the closure meeting of Serbia’s Enabling Digital Governance (EDGE) project.
When Serbia entered the top 10 of the GovTech Maturity Index this year, up from 51st in 2020, the story was sometimes conflated with a $50 million World Bank project. That framing gets the financing right and the agency wrong. The work happened at the Office for IT and eGovernment, the Kancelarija za IT i eUpravu.
Lenders finance and advise. But the counterparts absorb the political risk, run the migrations, and answer for every outage. The government cloud that now hosts more than 420 systems for 80 public entities was not built in Washington. Neither was the Security Operations Center that processes close to a billion security events a day, nor the effort that trained nearly 15,000 civil servants in data management, paperless work, and artificial intelligence.
Development banks measure success in disbursements and results indicators. The better measure is what remains after a project closes. In Serbia, what remains is a public team that knows how to run digital infrastructure at scale, and 2.5 million citizens saving over five million hours a year. It has been a privilege to work with Prof. dr Mihailo Jovanović and his team from the Bank side. The partnership continues under SERVIS: digital wallets, Serbian-language AI performance, and reaching the citizens the portals have not yet reached. The harder problems ahead are the ones worth having.