Digital sovereignty is usually framed as a question of infrastructure: where servers are located, who controls the networks, whether public data is hosted within national borders. These conditions are necessary. They are not sufficient.
Supporting states in mastering their infrastructure, data and digital skills means addressing all three pillars together. Yet it is the third — skills — that receives the least attention and the smallest budget, even though it conditions the other two.
Infrastructure you cannot operate remains a dependency
An administration can own a sovereign data centre and remain entirely dependent on the provider who installed it. If staff can neither administer the systems, nor govern the data they produce, nor assess the security of what they deploy, sovereignty is nominal at best.
This is the observation behind the design of GouvEARN, our programme for strengthening the digital capacity of civil servants: effective use of digital tools, data governance, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence applied to public-sector performance.
Training is not the same as transferring capability
A one-off training session is not enough either. A programme only becomes sustainable if the skills remain within the organisation once the provider has left: that means training internal trainers and handing over materials the administration can take forward on its own.
This is the logic we apply across all our capacity-building work, and the standard by which we judge its success: not the number of staff trained, but the organisation's ability to run the training again without us.