KOICA holds Digital Innovation Day

Lee Yun-young, acting president of KOICA, delivers a congratulatory speech at a Digital Innovation Day event in the agency's headquarters in Seongnam, Tuesday. Courtesy of KOICA

By Kang Seung-woo

The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) held a Digital Innovation Day event, Tuesday, highlighting the organization's digital transformation efforts to promote advanced official development assistance (ODA) in the post-pandemic era.

Following the establishment of its digital transformation strategy in 2021, KOICA is striving for efficiency through digital means in its projects and management for outcome-oriented development cooperation.

To strengthen capacity and bolster digital innovation, KOICA has set the period of April 17 to 28 as Digital Innovation Week. Various events will take place during the span, including the Digital Innovation Day event, lectures on digital innovation and an employee hackathon for digital transformation ideas.

The 2023 Digital Work Innovation Roadmap was announced at the event. The roadmap includes work automation, internal system improvements, the introduction of commercial software and increased data utilization. Through the event, KOICA presented goals to implement international development cooperation based on the latest digital technologies including AI, big data, augmented reality and cloud services.

The event also included a special lecture on the links between public administration and AI language models such as ChatGPT to strengthen the digital capacity of workers.

Under the slogan “Digit-ALL,” KOICA kicked off Digital Innovation Week, during which the agency will identify innovative ideas that employ new digital technologies for improved work efficiency. Until the first week of May, KOICA will gather ideas from all departments on work efficiency and select tasks in early June.

Acting President Lee Yun-young stressed the importance of “embracing and utilizing new technologies” to strengthen KOICA's role in the development cooperation ecosystem, in his congratulatory remarks at the event on Tuesday. “Even now, many companies are applying digital technology and performing in a way that is different from before,” Lee said. “I hope that the active participation of our staff in digital innovation will not only improve the efficiency and convenience of our work, but also enhance work satisfaction.”

KOICA has made various achievements in its digital transformation initiatives recently. It has integrated ODA-related data into one platform, its renewed KOICA Open Data Portal available in Korean and English. The portal includes information on partner countries and KOICA's support in the regions and various development index data provided by the United Nations and World Bank. Later this year, KOICA plans to launch a customized customer relationship management (CRM) system.

KOICA is also improving work efficiency and strengthening collaboration platforms through work automation using Python programming and the use of external software such as Flow.