ISLAMABAD, Oct 21 (APP):Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima Khawaja has said Pakistan is building digital public infrastructure to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) services are scalable, inclusive and trusted.
Addressing a panel discussion titled “Enabling Digital Government Service Delivery through DPI and AI” at the Global AI & Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul, South Korea, organised under the auspices of the World Bank, she thanked the World Bank and shared a key lesson from Pakistan’s experience, saying that AI was the final layer, not the first, and that an AI model was only as good, fair and trustworthy as the infrastructure supporting it.
“When governments skip the foundations, they do not get AI in public services; they get pilots that never scale and systems that citizens do not trust,” she said.
The minister said the real question was not which AI system to deploy, but what needed to be in place before AI could safely serve every citizen.
Highlighting Pakistan’s experience, she outlined four key foundations for effective AI-based public service delivery.
The first is digital identity, which enables an AI service to identify the person it is serving while ensuring that citizens retain control over who can access their data.
She said the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) already provided verified identities to more than 100 million Pakistanis. The system was now being extended into a digital identity framework capable of authenticating citizens online and recording and enforcing their consent.
Identity, she said, enabled AI services to be personalised without becoming invasive.
The second foundation is digital payments. The minister said many public services involved financial transactions, including social protection transfers, subsidies and fee payments.
Pakistan’s Raast instant payment system, operated by the State Bank of Pakistan, provided the public payment infrastructure needed to deliver such services.
She explained that when an AI model identified a household eligible for assistance, the payment system could turn that insight into actual delivery.
The third foundation is secure data exchange. The minister said AI-based government services could fail when data remained isolated within individual ministries and institutions.
Under the World Bank-supported Digital Economy Enhancement Project (DEEP), Pakistan is building its first national Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) stack, with WASL serving as its core national data exchange layer.
Through WASL, institutions will be able to share data securely under clearly defined rules. Every transaction will be authenticated, encrypted and logged, while citizen consent will be incorporated into the data exchange process.
On top of WASL, the government is also establishing a citizen “Super App” and the National Open Data Ecosystem (NODE), which will provide researchers, startups and AI developers with lawful access to public data.
The fourth foundation is data governance. The minister said the National Data Governance Policy, issued by the Pakistan Digital Authority, had been designed from the outset to establish a single national framework for classifying, sharing, protecting and publishing public data.
The framework also provides for visible and withdrawable citizen consent, audit trails to hold institutions accountable, and a clear principle that AI should support human decision-making rather than independently determine anyone’s rights or entitlements.
The minister said these four foundations would collectively make AI services scalable, inclusive and trustworthy.
Outlining the government’s future roadmap, she said Pakistan was building its AI layer on these foundations through the National Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies Development Programme (NAIEDP), which included two key components.
The first involves procuring and providing public computing capacity to ensure that Pakistani data is processed within the country and that the resulting economic value remains in the domestic economy.
The second is the development of Buraq, Pakistan’s own large language model built on Urdu and regional languages, to make AI inclusive for every citizen.
Concluding her address, the minister said building digital public infrastructure first might appear to be a slow process, but once established, it would make every subsequent AI service faster, cheaper and safer to launch.
“Pakistan has chosen this path, and we are grateful to the World Bank for walking it with us,” she said.
Source: APP (Associated Press of Pakistan)
