A humanity-scale digital public infrastructure?

In the closing plenary of the three-day Global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Summit, CEO of Co-Develop, C V Madhukar, challenged the 101 countries represented at the summit to embark on 101 successful DPI solutions by the next summit in 2025 – a more ambitious goal than the United Nation’s 50-in-5 programme. 

Bringing together 700 innovators from over 100 countries, 2024’s Global DPI Summit, held from October 1 to October 3 in Cairo, Egypt, marked a turning point in the sustainable development discourse this year.  

The summit signalled growing consensus around the need to build open and interoperable systems, like digital identity, digital payments, and data exchange, to support whole-of-society transformation. 

More importantly, Madhukar’s remark highlighted what stood out most in the summit: the high level of ambition at play. Here are five of the biggest ideas from this year’s Global DPI Summit. 

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1. DPI systems could work for humanity as a whole 

Policymakers tend to envision country-specific DPI systems – but could DPI alleviate global problems? 

In his keynote on the second day of the summit, Co-Chair at the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), Pramod Varma, argued that DPI thinking can lead to “humanity-scale infrastructure” and enable universal credentials sharing. 

This is the goal of the Finternet, a project that will put people and businesses in charge of their own data, in the form of tamper-proof digital credentials, and enable people to share these verified credentials across borders, he shared.  

These credentials could include their educational certificates, vaccination records, and other documents that people need to share while traveling across countries. 

Currently, cross-border data sharing requires system-to-system sharing between government agencies – but this network would be system-agnostic, much like the Internet. 

“If this dream comes true, it will be bigger than the Internet,” he claimed. 

2. AI and DPI can “supercharge” inclusion efforts 

During the summit, speakers also discussed the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and DPI to supercharge last-mile inclusion for vulnerable communities. 

In one panel on the future of DPI, India’s Joint Secretary (New Emerging and Strategic Technologies Division), Mahaveer Singhvi, shared that Bhashini, India’s AI-powered language translation platform, could enable people living in rural areas to access services in their own vernacular languages. 

Last year, India’s The Economic Times reported that India’s digital payments system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), is tapping on Bhashini to expand voice-based payments services across all of India’s 22 official languages – enabling users to make transfers over a phone call in their language of choice. 

In the same panel, the Director-General of Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission, Bisoye Coker-Odusote, likewise shared that AI could bridge language divides and improve service delivery at the local level in Nigeria, which has 525 dialects. 

3. When it comes to DPI, think open, interoperable protocols 

Next, a key idea that resonated throughout the sessions was to think of DPI solutions as a set of open, interoperable protocols – rather than closed platforms.  

That means building systems in the mould of the Internet, itself a set of protocols such as SMTP, the networking protocol that enables emails across different email clients, shared Varma in his keynote. 

With these protocols, countries can enable transaction economies where millions of buyers and sellers can transact with each other across open networks regardless of which platform they are on.  

This can take the form of India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce, (ONDC), which facilitates e-commerce transactions; the Unified Energy Interface, which facilitates transactions for electric vehicle (EV) chargers; and Kenya’s OneNetwork for the agriculture ecosystem, he said. 

In a session on interoperability, participants discussed how common standards and protocols, as well as open-source products, like Digital Public Goods, can pave the way for such cross-border transactions. 

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4. DPI can support regional integration

As such open systems can support cross-border transactions, they can potentially pave the way for stronger regional integrations.  

In conversation with GovInsider, a Senior Technical Advisor at CDPI, Daniel Abadie, shared that cross-border integration of digital systems will be the next step for DPI in Latin America. 

“If you simplify cross-border documentation [for instance], that means less time at the borders, less amount of money spent on freight transportation. You can lower the transportation costs which directly impacts connectivity in the region for any small producer in Brazil, Uruguay, or Argentina,” he explained. 

Abadie, who was previously Undersecretary for Digital Government in Argentina and oversaw the country’s innovative digital identity system, shares that such integration is possible because the region largely speaks the same language (Spanish). 

Similarly, CDPI’s Africa Director, Emmanuel Khisa, told GovInsider that there is a great opportunity to tap on DPI-thinking to create “systems that can scale” and enable a “single digital macrket” across the African continent. 

At the summit, the Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), Wamkele Mene, delivered a keynote on how the upcoming Pan-African Payment and Settlement System will simplify cross-border payments and eliminate barriers to intra-regional trade. 

5. Definition of DPI still evolving

What stands out from the summist is that DPI’s definition is rapidly evolving: from a focus on a few key digital systems to a systematic way of solving problems using open protocols and standards – “the DPI approach”. 

This may pose a challenge for those trying to document the DPI story. For instance, UCL’s David Eaves, who is Associate Professor of Digital Government at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, spoke about the Institute’s ambitious efforts to map out DPI initiatives globally.

The map focuses on identifying and evaluating whether various digital identity, digital payments, and data exchange systems meet the criteria for DPI. But as DPI expands to include open networks, such metrics may be insufficient. 

Similarly, DPI systems are traditionally defined as being owned by the public sector – but as Khisa pointed out to GovInsider, many impactful payment systems in developing regions, such as East Africa’s M-PESA, are privately-run while still delivering public impact. 

In countries where the public sector does not have resources to build DPIs, the private sector could step in to build and maintain such systems, while still running enterprise versions that are commercial, he noted. 

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