The Philippines' government-technology push has picked up another international trophy. The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) won a Bronze Stevie Award for its eGovPH ecosystem, its first Stevie, at an October 28 ceremony in Paris.

The entry, "Building a Contactless, Paperless and Cashless Government: The DICT eGov Ecosystem," placed in the Public Administration & Governance Innovation of the Year category of the 2026 International Business Awards. That competition reviewed more than 3,800 nominations from 78 countries and territories. Winners were picked by average scores from over 300 judges. The award was handed over at the Stevie Awards Fall Event at the Pullman Paris Montparnasse.

DICT said the win supports President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s directive to speed up digital transformation. The department pitched the project as a way to cut the time, travel and money Filipinos spend on government transactions, particularly workers, business owners and people in remote areas.

What the judges were looking at

The award covers a family of platforms rather than one app. Per DICT:

  • eGovPH Super App: more than 67 million downloads and over 1.1 billion transactions.
  • eGovDX: links more than 1,700 government systems for secure data sharing between agencies.
  • eVerify: digital identity verification, with more than 370 million transactions.
  • eGovAI: AI-assisted citizen support and job matching, with over 200 million transactions and about 10 million users.
  • eGovDocs: electronic approvals and digital signatures, with more than 48 million documents processed.
  • eLGU: online permit applications covering more than 1,100 local government units.
Courtesy: DICT

How fast it grew

The scale is the story. The Super App was formally launched in mid-2025 and had about 13 million users by June of that year. It passed 18 million by September 2025 and hit 40 million downloads in March 2026, meeting the government's 2026 target ahead of its goal of 60 million users by 2028. By June 2026 DICT was reporting 800 million transactions and about 100,000 downloads a day, and in July it cited 61 million downloads. The latest figures put it at 67 million downloads.

A string of recognitions

The Stevie follows other honors in 2025. In June, the eGovPH Super App was named E-Governance Project of the Year and eGovDX Digital Transformation of the Year at the GovMedia Awards in Singapore. Later that month, the Philippines was one of 12 of 193 countries to receive the UN E-Government Award, after moving from "High" to "Very High" in both the UN E-Government Development Index and the Online Service Index and climbing more than 15 places in the global ranking. A separate Bronze Stevie for a government platform is notable because the Stevies are business awards, a sign that the project is being judged as a service-delivery product and not just a policy.

The growing pains

The rapid growth has not been smooth. In April 2026, the app went down for as long as two days for some users after a surge in traffic, following the launch of new features. DICT said the outage was not a security incident, that servers were overwhelmed, and that it expanded server capacity. Sustaining the platforms will cost money: DICT is seeking a P2.7-billion budget for 2027, of which P800 million is earmarked for maintaining and enhancing the Super App.

Why it matters for the startup ecosystem

For Filipino builders, the eGov stack is increasingly a platform to build on. DICT's first eGovPH Hackathon in July 2026 invited tech talent to develop ideas and tools that could be integrated into the government's digital platforms, particularly the Super App. As more services move onto shared rails (identity, data exchange, documents, AI), startups that can plug into them, or solve the gaps they leave, have a growing domestic market to serve.

Sources