The United Nations University – Operating Unit on Policy-driven Electronic Governance (UNU-EGOV) will host Webinar #3, focusing on the development journey of the ICEGOV 2025 Best Research Paper Award–winning paper and the broader insights behind the Best Paper Award.
The guest speaker will be Robert O. Ifeonu, Lead Digital Development Specialist in the Information Technology Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria, who will present his award-winning paper, “Micro-Transformation Framework for Public Sector Innovation: Catalysing Resilient, Outcome-Driven Digital Governance”, and reflect on the journey that led to its development.
The session will also feature Tomasz Janowski, Associate Professor at Gdańsk University of Technology and Chair of the ICEGOV 2025 Best Paper Award Committee, who will share insights into the award process, including the evaluation and selection procedures, the challenges faced by the committee, the rationale underpinning the final decision, and the benefits of the award for recognized authors.
The seminar will be moderated by Naci Karkin, Senior Research Analyst at UNU-EGOV, and will open with remarks by Delfina Soares, Director of UNU-EGOV.
Seminar Overview
The seminar reflects on the development journey of an awarded ICEGOV 2025 Best Research paper, tracing how sustained engagement with small, practice-level digital interventions, later conceptualized as micro-transformations, informed a broader inquiry into how institutional capacity is built over time within complex public-sector systems. Grounded in real-world reform work, the presentation will explain how curiosity about incremental change, organizational friction, and uneven reform outcomes shaped the paper’s framing, guided the emergence of the analytical framework, and continues to influence its ongoing evolution.
Agenda
Speaker Bio
Robert O. Ifeonu is a Lead Digital Development Specialist at the Central Bank of Nigeria, where he works on digital governance and data-driven reform initiatives aimed at strengthening institutional capacity within complex regulatory systems. He has over 14 years of experience operating at the intersection of technology, institutions, and public value, with a research focus on institutional capacity building, micro-transformations, and human-centred digital governance. He holds a PhD in Information Systems Management from the University of Huddersfiled, UK and is a Fellow of the Africa Data Futures Fellowship. His work has been recognized with the UNU-EGOV's ICEGOV 2025 Best Research Paper Award.
Registration
Please register using this hyperlink: https://forms.office.com/r/QAe06pEXQQ
Event Link
The access link to the event will be sent to you after completing the registration.
