The UAE built a digital government that runs without paper, and it set itself a deadline in public and then met it. In 2018 Dubai launched the Dubai Paperless Strategy with a clear promise: after 2021, no employee or customer of the Dubai Government would need to print any paper document. In December 2021 the government announced the target had been reached across all 45 government entities, making Dubai the first fully paperless government in the world. The wider UAE digital government story rests on the same foundation: one national digital identity, UAE PASS, and a rule that services should be designed digital first, not paper first with a website attached.
UAE PASS, one identity for the whole country
UAE PASS is the national digital identity, launched in 2018 and developed jointly by Digital Dubai, the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) and Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement. One login opens federal and local services across all seven emirates, and it also works as a legally recognised digital signature, so contracts and applications can be signed from a phone. The app holds documents in a Digital Vault, and a verified account can be set up in minutes using face recognition, without visiting a service centre. The scale is now large: more than 12 million registered users, over 15,000 connected services and more than 350 service providers. The identity has become mandatory in places where it matters most. Since 18 October 2024, UAE PASS has been the only way to log in to the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, after the ministry deleted all old usernames and passwords. Similar moves have happened at the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Tax Authority. When a government is willing to switch off the old login, it signals that the digital one is ready.
Dubai’s paperless promise, in numbers
The Dubai Paperless Strategy was rolled out in five phases, each bringing a new group of government entities on board. By the end, more than 1,800 digital services and over 10,500 key transactions were available without paper. The reported savings show why a government would bother: more than 336 million sheets of paper no longer used, over 1.3 billion dirhams saved, and more than 14 million working hours saved across the government. Behind those figures sits a practical change in how work gets done. Internal approvals, signatures and certificates moved onto shared platforms, and the legal framework was adjusted so that a digital document carries the same weight as a printed one. The DubaiNow app gathers more than 130 services from over 50 entities in one place, covering bills, driving, housing, residency, health and education. For a resident, the paperless promise is felt as a series of small absences: no printed form, no photocopied ID, no return visit to collect a stamped paper.
Designing for the resident, not the department
What distinguishes the UAE approach is that it started from the resident’s experience rather than the department’s org chart. Services are grouped by what people need to do, renew a licence, pay a bill, sponsor a family visa, and the identity, signature and payment layers are shared by every agency. A new service does not need to build its own login or its own payment system; it plugs into the ones that already exist. The country also set public targets and reported against them, including the national goal of having all government services available online end to end, with most transactions completed digitally. That habit of publishing targets and results is itself a design choice. It turns digital transformation from an internal IT project into a public commitment that leaders can be judged against. South Korea took a similar path with its own single portal, as described in our look at Korea’s digital government, and the pattern is the same: shared identity, shared infrastructure, services organised around life events.
The trade-offs worth naming
A paperless government is not automatically a better government. Removing paper removes the fallback that people used when systems failed or when they could not use a screen. Residents without smartphones, older people and workers who are not comfortable with apps still need assisted channels, and the UAE keeps service centres for that reason. A single identity also concentrates risk: if UAE PASS is compromised or unavailable, many services stop at once, so security and backup capacity are not optional extras. There is also the question of cost. The savings figures are impressive, but building shared identity, signature and vault infrastructure took years of investment before the savings arrived. And a paperless promise works best in a city-state sized administration like Dubai; applying the same model across a large federal system, with more layers of government, is a slower job. For Vietnam, the relevant lesson is narrower and more practical: protecting personal data matters more, not less, as identity systems centralise, and the legal recognition of digital signatures has to arrive at the same time as the technology, or people will keep printing “just in case”.
What this means
The UAE’s digital government shows the power of a public deadline. Dubai said it would go paperless by December 2021, rebuilt its services around one identity and one signature, and then did it. The savings in paper, money and hours are real, but the deeper change is cultural: once residents expect every service to work from a phone, no department can quietly go back to paper. For countries still on that journey, including Vietnam, the lesson is to make the promise specific, build the shared layers once, and measure the result in hours saved for ordinary people.