World Bank Flags Pakistan’s $69 Million Digital Project Over Slow Disbursement
The World Bank's latest review of the $69.16 million Digital Economy Enhancement Project shows real infrastructure has been built, but nearly every usage target is being missed by a wide margin, with women's participation sitting at under a third of its goal.
Pakistan has spent two years and roughly $8 million building the foundation of a national digital public infrastructure system. The World Bank’s latest review shows that foundation is real, but almost nobody is using what’s been built on top of it yet. The Bank has flagged slow financial disbursement and a series of implementation gaps in the Digital Economy Enhancement Project (DEEP), a $69.16 million initiative meant to give the government the capacity to deliver digitally enabled public services to citizens and businesses. Just $8.36 million, or 12.09 percent, has been disbursed so far, leaving $60.80 million unspent more than two years after the project became effective in May 2024. It was approved in March 2024 and is scheduled to close in July 2028.
Despite the slow spending, the World Bank hasn’t downgraded DEEP into failure territory. It rated overall progress toward the project’s development objective and overall implementation progress as “Moderately Satisfactory”, with the project’s overall risk rating held at “Moderate”. That’s a project the Bank considers salvageable and partially working, not one it’s flagging for a fundamental rethink, at least not yet.
The project runs across four components: improving digital economy, governance, and service delivery capabilities, the largest piece at an estimated $58 million; development of the Pakistan Business Portal, at $15 million; and project management, at $5 million.
Some of the underlying infrastructure has genuinely come together. NADRA has issued 2.3 million Digital IDs, and 6.5 million transactions have already been processed through the National Data Exchange Layer, the backbone system meant to let different government databases talk to each other securely. The PakID Vault, the digital credential-storage system, now supports 11 types of verifiable credentials. On the policy side, the Enterprise Architecture Framework has been completed, and the Data Governance Policy has been disclosed for public consultation, both foundational documents the rest of the system depends on.
The gap between what’s been built and what’s actually being used is where this review turns pointed. Transactions through the National Data Exchange Layer stood at 650,000 in August 2026, against a closing-period target of 13.333 million, meaning current usage sits at under 5 percent of where the project needs to land by the time it closes. Only six entities have been integrated with the national data exchanger, against a target of 40 by November 2027, and private-sector integration is barely underway at all, with just one private-sector entity connected against a target of 13.
The credential vault tells a similar story on a smaller scale: 11 verifiable credentials are currently storable against a target of 40. The national citizen services portal is actually ahead on one metric, offering 18 services against a target of 20, one of the only areas where the project is close to its goal. The Pakistan Business Portal, by contrast, has processed zero Registration, Licenses, Certificates and Other (RLCO) transactions so far, against a target of 4,000 annual transactions by November 2027, and both B2G payments and RLCO services completed online remain at zero against a target of 50 percent.
The gender gap is arguably the most striking figure in the entire review. Women accounted for just 9.2 percent of users of digitally enabled services, against a closing-period target of 30 percent, a shortfall of more than two-thirds. Data on youth users wasn’t even available for the report, meaning the project can’t currently demonstrate progress on that front either way.
The Bank’s prescription is specific rather than general. It wants MoITT, operating under the institutional framework created by the Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025, to prepare a time-bound service prioritization and onboarding strategy in coordination with the newly formed Pakistan Digital Authority and both federal and provincial governments, covering concrete targets at six months, one year, and two years out. It also wants the Enterprise Architecture Framework published alongside a formal adoption roadmap, the Data Governance Policy and Interoperability Framework formally adopted and operationalized rather than left in consultation, and the completion of the feasibility study for the National Fiberization Plan, a requirement that’s been outstanding since the project’s early stages.
DEEP isn’t an isolated initiative sitting quietly inside one ministry. It’s meant to serve as the federal backbone underneath Pakistan’s broader digital transformation agenda, including provincial programs like the $70 million Connected Punjab Programme, which was explicitly built to plug into DEEP’s national platforms and policies rather than duplicate them. When the foundational layer is running at under 5 percent of its usage target with two years still on the clock, every program depending on that foundation inherits the same uncertainty.
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The infrastructure numbers, 2.3 million Digital IDs issued, 6.5 million transactions processed, and an Enterprise Architecture Framework completed, are not nothing. They represent real technical groundwork that a country doesn’t get to skip. But infrastructure that isn’t being adopted doesn’t deliver the outcome the project was funded for, and a Pakistan Business Portal that has processed zero transactions against a 4,000-transaction target is difficult to read as anything other than a system that exists on paper more than in practice. The 9.2 percent women’s participation rate, in particular, is the kind of gap that tends to widen rather than close on its own without a deliberate intervention, since digital access barriers by gender in Pakistan are well documented and don’t resolve simply because a service becomes technically available.
With roughly two years left before the July 2028 closing date, DEEP’s remaining runway isn’t short, but the World Bank’s own targets suggest the gap between what’s built and what’s actually used has to close far faster than it has so far. The project’s next review will show whether MoITT’s response to this one was a turning point or another entry in the same pattern: strong infrastructure, weak adoption, and targets that keep slipping further out of reach as the clock runs down.
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