We are in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
The Baltic country is home to 1.3 million people, and to one of the most advanced digital societies in the world.
From e-residency to online voting to national ID cards,
we’re here to see how Estonia could be a blueprint for other countries looking to go digital.
For our first stop, we went straight to the top with a visit to Estonia’s President Kersti Kaljulaid.
If you could describe Estonia’s digital society to someone who has maybe
never heard of it before, what would you say?
You can apply for a passport, you can apply for a driver’s license,
you can sell your car and buy a car online, register it online.
So most of the services in Estonia when it concerns public service is digital.
We have a generation who has grown up knowing that you communicate digitally.
Estonians realized because they embraced internet and technology,
business and everything, is going to move to the internet.
Instead of just having an offline ID card, you also need something that works online.
So we are inside the showroom of e-Estonia which showcases a lot of the country’s digital solutions.
We’re going to take a look at the electronic ID and digital signatures.
Every Estonian is issued a digital ID.
Physical ID cards are paired with digital signatures that citizens use to pay taxes,
vote, do online banking and access their healthcare records.
For a small country, the impact of the digital signatures has been big,
saving the government an estimated two percent of GDP per year in salaries and expenses.
Estonia says 99 percent of its public services are available online 24/7.
It takes under five minutes to fill out taxes online, around one-third of citizens vote online
and 99 percent of prescriptions are issued electronically.
Health records can be shared among doctors using a single electronic file
that the owner can see at any point in time, too.
So, here you can see a list of doctors that I have been in treatment with.
Everything that regards your health record, your health this is here.
Another big feature of Estonia’s digital society is the e-residency program.
This basically allows you to start a company here in Estonia even if you’re not a resident.
E-residents can benefit from the European Union’s single market without actually living in the EU.
Estonia was the first country in the world to offer e-residency and so far more than
50,000 people have applied for the program since it launched in 2014.
So we are on our way to meet Taavi Kotka.
Taavi is a well-known presence in Estonia as the country’s first Chief Information Officer.
We just started to think about it, how can we increase the people connected to Estonia.
We had to approach this question differently
and we took the approach that okay, why not connect them digitally?
So how did Estonia become so high-tech?
It all started in 1991 when Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union.
The government embarked on a series of fast track reforms to modernize the economy
and it saw investments in technology as a key way to boost economic growth.
By 2000 all schools were equipped with computers,
and today children as young as seven years old learn how to code.
The government also offered free computer training to 10 percent of the adult population.
These efforts helped raise the percentage of Estonians who use the internet
from 29 percent in the year 2000 to an impressive 91% in 2016.
Skype was one of Estonia’s early tech success stories.
The video chatting company, which was bought by Microsoft, was founded here in 2003.
Estonia claims it's home to more tech unicorns, which are private companies valued at more than $1 billion,
per capita than any other small country in the world.
Its recent unicorns include payments company Transferwise and Uber competitor Taxify.
Other companies focusing on everything from blockchain to organic food
are now vying to be the next Estonian unicorn.
I think the environment that is set up right now is very friendly and I hope they keep it this way.
So the road to a digital society here in Estonia hasn’t been without bumps along the way.
In 2007, the country suffered a massive cyber attack
which forced the government to take steps toward protecting online security.
Estonia helped launch a branch of NATO devoted to fighting similar attacks.
The government created a data embassy in Luxembourg where it stores a copy of all of its data.
And schools teach “cyber hygiene” starting in elementary school.
The efforts haven’t stopped cyberattacks altogether,
but today many people here are convinced their data is safer online than on pen and paper.
You actually see who has access to the data, what data was collected, why, how it was used.
And if you have an ability to control it, you can cover it, you can delete it, etc,
it actually gives you more privacy.
One thing we learned about Estonia’s digital society, it’s not enough just to keep up with technology.
As its population ages, Estonia is trying to lure in high-skilled workers like digital nomads,
remote workers who use technology to do their jobs anywhere around the world.
We’re heading in to meet Karoli Hindricks.
She’s the CEO of a company called Jobbattical, she is working with Killu Vantsi from the
Estonian Interior Ministry to develop what would be the world’s first digital nomad visa.
It’s one example of a public- private partnership at work.
It really reflects what our whole immigration policy is about.
We want to attract the talented people, entrepreneurs that are beneficial to our society to our economy.
Do you see it as important to be attracting skilled workers?
The loud speaker of the world, which means, the United States right now, or Brexit,
it kind of seems that loud is closing down but there’s a lot of countries that are actually
thinking about how to make it easier, how to attract people.
Where people will move will very much define the failure or success of an economy, right?
So we're seeing how initiatives like the digital nomad visa and e-residency
are encouraging startups and entrepreneurs here in Estonia.
This is the Tehnopol complex, it's home to more than 200 tech companies.
Priit Kruus founded a health tech company whose app helps detect early stages of skin cancer.
The small environment, the digital environment, people are very open for new innovations.
As a market size it’s not that big so you really have to think big at the very first step
and think of your growth plans into other countries, and other continents even.
Replicating Estonia’s digital success in bigger, more diverse countries, will be easier said than done.
After all, the entire population here is roughly equivalent to that of Dallas.
But in a world that’s only getting more digital,
there are a lot of lessons we can learn from this glimpse into the future.
Hey guys, Elizabeth here, coming to you from Estonia. Thanks so much for watching.
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