This article relates to Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions, one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Goal icon by the United Nations. Emberoot is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the UN.
Technology for SDG 16 is less about futuristic gadgets and more about making public information visible and services harder to abuse. When contracts, court backlogs and identity systems move online in open formats, it becomes easier for journalists, citizens and auditors to spot problems. This article looks at well-documented examples linked to the Peace, justice and strong institutions goal, what they achieved, and where digital systems create new risks of their own.
Open contracting: Ukraine’s Prozorro
Public procurement is one of the biggest corruption risks in any government, because so much money moves through it. After 2014, Ukraine built Prozorro, an open-source e-procurement system that publishes tenders and contracts so anyone can see them. The Open Contracting Partnership reports that the system had produced savings of more than 6 billion US dollars as of December 2020.
Publishing data was only half the story. A civil society monitoring platform, DOZORRO, invited people to review tenders and flag problems. By December 2020, the same source says, DOZORRO monitors had found violations in more than 33,000 tenders. The combination of open data and organised scrutiny is the part other governments can copy.
Other governments can reuse the approach through the Open Contracting Data Standard, a common format for publishing contracting data across the whole process. It is released under the Apache 2.0 licence, so anyone can build on it.
Court data: India’s National Judicial Data Grid
Access to justice (target 16.3) depends partly on how long cases take. India’s National Judicial Data Grid publishes live counts of pending and disposed cases, broken down by type and by how long they have been waiting. When we checked the dashboard in October 2026, it showed roughly 4.78 crore pending cases (about 47.8 million). The numbers change daily, which is the point: a backlog that is visible can be measured, compared across courts and discussed in public.
Dashboards like this do not shorten a single hearing on their own. They help court administrators decide where to send judges and staff, and they let researchers and journalists track whether reforms are working.
Digital identity: reach and risk
Target 16.9 calls for legal identity for all. The World Bank’s ID4D programme estimates that about 800 million people worldwide did not have official identification as of 2024. Without it, people can struggle to open a bank account, receive benefits or prove who they are in court.
India’s Aadhaar system shows what digital ID can do at scale. The UIDAI website reported more than 145 crore Aadhaar enrolments when we checked in October 2026. It is widely used to deliver subsidies and verify identity for services.
Scale brings risk. Biometric systems can fail for manual workers whose fingerprints are worn, people in remote areas may lack connectivity, and a single national database raises serious questions about privacy, data security and surveillance. Good design includes offline fallbacks, clear limits on who can use the data and for what, and a way for people to fix mistakes in their records.
- Data is open and in a standard format
- Citizens and auditors can act on it
- There is a manual fallback
- Privacy rules are written into the design
- People without access are shut out
- Data is collected with no clear limit
- Errors cannot be corrected
- Dashboards replace action
Right to information, online
Target 16.10 covers public access to information. The UN’s 2026 progress report says 141 countries now have access to information laws, but a stress test of 76 countries found 38 per cent gave no substantive response to requests. Online request portals help close that gap. India’s RTI Online portal lets citizens file Right to Information requests and first appeals to central government bodies and pay the fee digitally, then track their status.
AI: useful with care
AI tools can help sort large document sets, translate legal information into local languages or flag unusual patterns in spending data. They also carry clear risks for this goal: biased models used in policing or sentencing, generated misinformation that distorts public debate, and opaque decisions that people cannot challenge. For any public-facing system, the test is whether a person can understand a decision and appeal it.
What this means for builders
Most of the value in this space comes from plain, reliable software: a case tracker for a legal aid clinic, a complaints system for a city department, a tool that turns procurement data into alerts. If you are a founder or non-profit building something similar, start with open standards, design for low bandwidth and plan for privacy from the first sprint. Our SaaS development and technology advice work covers this kind of build, and our Global Goals hub links to the rest of this series.
Frequently asked questions
How does open data reduce corruption?
Publishing contracts, budgets and spending in a standard format lets journalists, auditors and citizens check them. Unusual prices, single bidders or links between officials and suppliers become easier to spot. Ukraine’s Prozorro system combined open procurement data with a citizen monitoring platform, and reported savings of more than 6 billion US dollars by 2020.
What are the risks of digital ID systems?
Digital ID can exclude people whose fingerprints do not scan well or who lack connectivity, and large central databases raise privacy, security and surveillance concerns. Errors in records can block access to services. Safer systems include offline fallbacks, strict rules on data use and a simple way for people to correct their information.
Can AI help deliver justice?
AI can help with tasks such as sorting documents, translating legal information and spotting patterns in public spending data. It should not make decisions about people’s rights without human review. Models can reflect bias in their training data, so any system used in justice or policing needs transparency and a clear way to appeal.