Cambodia Data eXchange (CamDX) has won the Open Source Adaptation of the Year award from The Future of Government Awards after competing against 150 entries from 52 different countries.

Launched by the Techo Startup Center of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, CamDX serves as the backbone of Cambodia’s ministries to exchange data with one another to create various online public services.

In the Open Source Adaptation category, which had eight other nations on its shortlist of 10, Cambodia was one of 10 nations, including South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

The evaluation was approved by a panel of 17 judges from various countries with extensive experience in government and technology.

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Winning the rigorous assessment is a source of great pride for Cambodia as the country embraces digital technology as a national development agenda through the implementation of economic policy framework, the Digital Society of Cambodia 2021-2035, and the Digital Government Policy of Cambodia 2022-2035.

The Government of the Future Award is an incentive program for the government's digital revolution to improve the quality of life and daily life of citizens. The award aims to promote the use of open-source technology in government technology that positively impacts society through the government's transparent and efficient provision of public services.

This is the first international award that Cambodia has received for CamDX after the Kingdom put it into operation more than two years ago.

CamDX had assisted 19,823 firms with a total registered capital of $5.6 billion as of November 29, using an average of only eight working days.

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CamDX's current members in the business registration framework include nearly all of Cambodia’s ministries. It is soon expanding its reach to the financial sector, both banks and non-banks, through partnerships with the National Bank of Cambodia.

The total number of data exchange activities on CamDX has surpassed 13 million transactions, with only 4.76 million transactions in the first year.

CamDX is decentralizing data exchange to provide online services to private and public organizations, putting Cambodia in line with leading nations such as Japan, Finland and Iceland.

A recent Asian Development Bank (ADB) study states CamDX is Cambodia’s initiative to improve data collection and data sharing. The platform “curates data from different information systems into a unified and decentralized data exchange platform to provide a secure and standardized way of accessing data”.

The MEF uses CamDX to support Online Business Registration (OBR) and Validation Application on Payment Guarantee. OBR is among the first public services that allow the use of CamDigiKey, the e-government's single sign-on service. Business owners can get an estimated approval time of eight days and a 40 percent reduction on the registration fee using OBR.

CamDX adopts Estonia’s X-Road for a unified yet decentralized data exchange to provide online services to the general public. X-Road is a software solution that allows Estonia’s “various public and private sector e-service information systems to link up and function in harmony.

CamDX is comparable to the “information highway” for data flow when there is data. It serves as an information exchange between ministries”, Taing Nguonly, Techo Startup Center director, told the audience during an ADB webinar in August.