Most countries publish digital transformation strategies. Very few publish a running assessment of the digital-reform potential in the legislation they pass each quarter. Ukraine's GovTech Reform Index — a joint project of VoxUkraine and GGTC Kyiv, launched in 2025 — is closing that gap.

The dilemma

Governments around the world publish digital transformation strategies, national AI roadmaps, and cybersecurity plans. What is much harder to find is a running sense of the substance behind the legislation meant to support them: is each newly adopted act a meaningful step for the country's digital ecosystem, or a marginal, procedural change? Legislation is typically reported one act at a time, in the language of what it changes, rather than measured against whether the country as a whole is becoming more digital. Without a way to track this systematically and consistently, it is hard to see whether the quality and digital-reform potential of legislation are improving over time, or standing still.

The regulatory gap

What was needed was a quantitative measure that could be applied consistently to the acts a parliament and government produce, quarter after quarter, to assess how much they are advancing digital transformation. That meant three things. First, the defined set of policy areas broad enough to cover the regulatory landscape. Second, the method for scoring individual acts against agreed criteria such as innovativeness, feasibility, and duration of impact. Third, the Expert Council that applies the method impartially. No such benchmark existed in Ukraine, and few comparable ones are present globally.

The approach

In 2025, Vox Ukraine, a Ukrainian analytical platform with more than a decade of experience in measuring reform, launched the GovTech Reform Index in partnership with GGTC Kyiv, the second GovTech Centre in the World Economic Forum’s 4IR (Fourth Industrial Revolution) Network, initiated by Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation, implemented by East Europe Foundation (EEF) with the support of the Swiss-Ukrainian EGAP Program.

The Index applies a defined formula to regulatory acts signed by the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s Parliament), the Cabinet of Ministers, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, and other governmental institutions, drawing on publicly available legislative sources. Acts are selected by the joint analytical team of VoxUkraine and GGTC Kyiv and classified into one of 22 policy areas, from e-government and cybersecurity to healthcare, defence, and social protection. An independent Expert Council comprising more than 20 representatives from civil society, business, international institutions, and academia then scores each act on a scale of 0 to 3 against three criteria: its innovativeness, the implementation feasibility, and its likely long-term impact. The final score for each act is the median of all experts’ scores. Each policy area's score is the arithmetic mean of the acts within it. The overall Index is a weighted average of the policy-area scores, with weights based on the number of acts in each area. The methodology is published in full, and results are released per quarter.

Results achieved so far

Within Volume 1 (Q1–Q2 2025) we assessed 109 acts: 65 in Q1 and 44 in Q2. The Index scored 1.98 in both quarters. eGovernment was the most active policy area, with 24 acts assessed, followed by cybersecurity (12) and telecommunications, business environment, and social protection (9 each). The highest-scoring areas were ecology and environment protection (2.17), telecommunications (2.13), and education and science (2.10); the lowest were construction and customs and border control (both 1.75) and social protection (1.80).

Volume 2 (Q3–Q4 2025) covered a much larger caseload: 101 acts in Q3 and 145 in Q4, more than double the first half of the year — and the Index eased to 1.84 in both quarters. According to the expert scores, acts adopted in this period were, on average, more feasible to implement under current conditions but less digitally innovative than those in the first half. E-government again led by volume (22 acts in Q3, 29 in Q4); the highest-scoring areas in Q3 were transport, mobility and logistics (2.42), customs and border control (2.17), and economy and finance (2.17). Cybersecurity activity rose sharply in Q4, from 2 acts in Q3 to 12, averaging 1.94, reflecting new rules aligning Ukraine with the EU’s NIS2 cyber-incident-response requirements.

Volume 3 (Q1 2026) covered 59 acts — fewer than the previous two quarters — but the Index rose to 2.01, the highest score recorded since monitoring began, and the first quarter in which no assessed act scored 1.0 or below. The Cabinet of Ministers issued 61% of the acts assessed. The top-scoring policy areas were defence and ecology and environmental protection (both 2.33), followed by education and science and healthcare (2.17 each).

One limit is worth noting. The Index has now been running for five quarters, providing just over a year of data. Its longer-term influence on how legislation is drafted or how the government prioritises reform will become clearer after several years of data collection. As with most measurement tools, its value depends less on the score in any single quarter than on the trend it makes visible over time.

Intended outcomes

Because the Index is early in its life, the outcomes below are what its authors expect it to deliver as more data accumulates, rather than results already observed.

The authors intend the Index to give Ukrainian policymakers a clearer, more systematic view of the digital-reform potential embedded in the legislation they pass. They expect it to make it easier for civil society and international partners to identify where legislative progress is strong and where it is falling behind. They also see it as a reference for other countries considering similar tools, so that measurement of GovTech reform can become a comparable practice across jurisdictions rather than a purely national exercise.

The transferable lesson

The most compelling aspect about this case for other jurisdictions is the discipline of measurement itself. Digital transformation strategies are common. Public, regularly updated, methodologically transparent tools for tracking whether legislation is actually delivering them are rare. The GovTech Reform Index shows that two NGOs — VoxUkraine, an analytical organisation, and GGTC Kyiv, a Centre focused on GovTech innovations — can jointly build and sustain such a tool. Two design choices are broadly applicable. Separating the measurement from the government being measured is one: representatives of state authorities are excluded from the Expert Council that scores each act, thereby protecting the Index's independence and credibility. In addition, publishing the underlying data instead of limiting the release to the headline score alone allows external analysts to scrutinise the assessments and creates an incentive for the Index to remain grounded in the evidence.