Fung Mei Ling, Co-Founder, People-Centered Internet

​​​​​​1. How do you use your role to ensure that technology and policy are truly inclusive?

Inclusive systems don’t emerge on their own — they must be deliberately designed. In my work, this begins with empowering underrepresented voices.

Through the GovTech Women Challenge, we identify and elevate emerging female talent early, ensuring they help write the blueprint of the digital future.

Equally essential is amplifying advocacy. We are beginning to design a Speakers Bureau for the GovTech Women’s 300+ participants and mentors, so more learn how to shape policy in their own countries and globally. 

Inclusion requires access to capital by innovators everywhere.

By addressing the US $5.7 trillion financing gap for SMEs, we enable local innovators to develop local solutions to local challenges.

This shifts the paradigm from helplessness and  dependency to community-strengthening resilience — the truly sustainable foundation of an inclusive digital economy.

2. What’s a moment in your career when you saw firsthand how technology or a new policy changed a citizen’s life for the better?

Early in my career at Intel, I was the alpha tester for their global sales and marketing system.

While this sounds like a back-end corporate project, I witnessed a profound ripple effect.

By training technical teams in Intel’s distributors to help businesses deploy the technical innovations, we increased access while lowering the cost of innovation globally.

I saw firsthand how distributing the supply chain to embrace skilled local talent ultimately democratised access to technology, resulting in lower barriers to innovation and higher quality relevant and appropriate technology for improving the lives of everyday citizens around the world.

3. What was the most impactful project you worked on this year, and how did you measure its success in building trust and serving the needs of the public?

My most impactful work this year focused on narrowing the financing gap for SMEs especially in the rural sector.

The key vehicle was establishing the ASEAN GovStack Working Group, which brought together leaders from nine ASEAN nations to advance cross-border interoperability for Digital Public Infrastructure — particularly digital IDs and payment systems that can lower the cost of transferring funds across national borders.

I measured success by the strength of the coalition we built. We brought GIZ, AI Singapore’s Project SEA-Lion, Thailand’s interoperability bodies, and legislators in Cambodia and Laos into a shared quest for interoperability across the ASEAN region.

This quest offers an alternative approach: By having the objective of enabling local SMEs to offer affordable, context-specific alternatives, we’re bringing leaders from different countries to work together to build trust locally from the ground up while working on regional interoperability for digital public infrastructure.

4. What was one unexpected lesson you learned this year about designing for real people? This can be about a specific project or a broader lesson about your work.

There is no 'single user’ - you cannot design a one-size-fits-all solution.

I realised and began to deeply understand that you must be in a constant state of discovery, listening to what inspires different people in different places with different hopes and dreams.

The challenge is how to weave those disparate motivations into a coherent regional narrative that still allows for 'forks and twists.'

To appeal to actual people living very different lives, we must design and develop public infrastructure able to support them and to meet people where they are, recognising and understanding they have hopes and dreams which can be very different from those hopes and dreams of funders or designers.

5. We hear a lot about AI. What's a practical example of how AI can be used to make government services more inclusive and trustworthy?

We need to rethink how we measure and what we track in terms of public services.

Education, health, transportation and social services aren’t organised around business quarterly accounting cycles or MBOs - Management by Objectives or KPI - Key Performance Indicators. Education, Health, Transportation, social services span the entire life of a citizen.

For inclusivity, AI offers extraordinary new capability to shift from tracking inputs and outputs to additionally measuring outcome AND impact from the point of view of the citizens - as individuals and in aggregate.

It can help funders, policy makers and operators visualise how their decisions play out over months, years, even decades, allowing governments to adapt and course correct to minimise harm.

When people see that their voices and feedback influence government action, trust becomes a natural byproduct, not a slogan.

AI can process large volumes of citizen feedback and show, transparently, how that input shapes policy decisions.

6. How are you preparing for the next wave of change in the public sector? What new skill, approach, or technology are you most excited to explore in the coming year?

I am excited to explore learning by people in the community and in networks of communities.

I want to see how networks of people working on similar challenges can use AI to see what others are doing and thus be in a position to adapt in real-time.

If we can speed up our collective learning—sharing both successes and failures faster than we do today —we can design significantly more resilient systems together.

7. What advice do you have for public sector innovators who want to build a career focused on serving all citizens?

My advice is simple: Listen, listen, listen.

And secondly: Do not fear frustration. Public sector innovation is hard work, but that difficulty is an asset.

By sticking with the hard problems, you acquire rare skills that others lack because they haven't had the opportunity to navigate complex systemic challenges.

It is difficult, but the resilience you build makes the career worth it.

8. Who inspires you to build a more inclusive and trustworthy public sector?

It begins with my parents—both civil servants—especially my mother, who taught me to ask hard, systemic questions to fix problems at their root rather than just treating symptoms.

But beyond my immediate family, I am inspired by the silent sacrifices of the countless generations that came before us.

We are the beneficiaries of their resilience. We must build institutions that are strong enough and inclusive enough to serve the generations that will come after us.

9. If you had an unlimited budget, what would your dream project be?

I would build a Global Impact Ecosystem that fuses economic growth with leadership development.

I would integrate a Global SME Knowledge Exchange—where businesses trade innovations and lessons learned—with a massively scaled Women in GovTech Speakers Bureau for all genders.

With an unlimited budget, we wouldn't just be exchanging knowledge; we would be creating digital assets and actively nurturing leaders.

We would provide the platform for these women to not only share their expertise but to build the digital infrastructure of the future, ensuring that the people building the technology represent the world they serve.                         

10. Outside tech, what excites you the most?

The opportunity to make music with others. It requires intense listening and a hyper-awareness of the people around you.

You have to forecast what your partners are going to do and react in the moment to maintain harmony.

It is a great relief for me to engage in this deep collaboration without words or text, yet it allows me to practice the exact same skills—adaptability, listening, and synchronisation—that I need in my professional work.

This feature was made possible in partnership with GovStack.