THE government stands to save as much as P40 billion annually by eliminating duplicated technology spending across agencies, a windfall from its e-governance push that will also bankroll a fund to tap local start-ups next year.
In an interview on Wednesday, Undersecretary for E-Government David Almirol of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said government agencies requested more than P200 billion for information and communications technology (ICT) projects for 2025 alone, much of it overlapping.
‘When we looked at it, there was so much duplication, so many redundancies, so many repetitions. So, if you put governance to it, we estimate we can save around P30 billion to P40 billion from that,’ he said on the sidelines of the eGov Hackathon event in Taguig.
Almirol cited human resources payroll systems and asset management platforms that individual agencies seek to build separately – each easily costing hundreds of millions of pesos – when a single shared system could serve all of them for free.
Bulk procurement of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) subscriptions could also yield bigger discounts, he added.
The DICT has, likewise, decommissioned 60 percent of cloud services in e-government since 2023 after finding that many servers were being paid for but left unused, cutting costs further.
He explained that the savings are being generated under Republic Act 12054, or the E-Governance Act, which mandates the streamlining of government digital processes and bars agencies from duplicating systems.
Almirol said the agency will allocate at least P100 million next year to engage start-ups as systems integrators, developers, or research and development (RandD) partners-not as investment recipients.
‘They’ve already built a lot of things. Why repeat them?’ he said. ‘Instead of engaging foreign entities that are very expensive, Filipinos are more than capable of doing it.’
The engagement will draw from a pool of 137 startups, spanning education technology, financial technology, agriculture technology, health technology, peace and order applications, and automation tools for local government units.
Priority will likely go to start-ups with integration capabilities, Almirol said, as the eGov PH super app now has some 1,300 government systems integrated, with more in the pipeline.
The engagement will also cover cybersecurity, including white-hat hackers who can help secure the platform.
Almirol acknowledged continued pushback from some agencies and local governments hesitant to integrate, which he attributed to vested interests threatened by the cost reductions.
‘Big savings mean smaller business for some,’ he said. ‘The government is not a business; we’re here to help. At the end of the day, it’s taxpayers’ money being used in government.’