Digital Public Infrastructure an “exponential equaliser”, says UNDP

A couple of months ago, this writer sat down with Gayan Peiris, Head of Data and Technology at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to discuss the organisation’s massive transformation to become one of the “first UN agencies to have a digital office”, capable of supporting the development of the more than 170 countries in which the agency operates.

However, that would only be telling half the story. For UNDP, digital transformation is also a development tool in and of itself, what the agency’s Head of Digital and AI Programmes, Keyzom Ngodup Massally, calls “an exponential equaliser”.

Nowhere is this truer than in the contexts of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), interoperable digital systems that enable countries to safely and efficiently provide economic opportunities and effectively deliver social services.

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An exponential equaliser

Today, DPI is a priority across the UN – one needs only look at ITU’s GovStack programme, or the DPI Safeguards initiative that UNDP is stewarding with the Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology (OSET).

“Three years ago,” Massally tells Govinsider, “we saw examples from leaders like Estonia, Brazil and India – where the time to reach 80% per cent financial inclusion decreased from 40 years to five years”. These forerunners helped to identify the opportunities of DPI for development, as well as challenges and how to address them through collective action.

I ask Massally why it is that there has been such a buy-in across countries, and so quickly, for DPI.

It is a question of scale, she says. Through DPI, there is an opportunity to “create an entire ecosystem to deliver better and more services that can help a farmer improve his or her livelihood, or help a woman access cash transfers much more easily”.

In the context of development, there is a chance for “DPI to be an exponential equaliser if it is designed and implemented right”. As she put it in another interview: “DPI goes beyond technology, it’s an approach”.

When I ask what this means concretely, Massally mentions three things: being multistakeholder; building commonality; and safeguarding against risks.

The first two are very much two sides of the same coin. Common platforms and regulations, and taking a multistakeholder approach, allows governments to leverage the breadth of DPI, putting “people at the centre of these systems” in fully realising the case studies that it can support.

Key to linking these building blocks – says Massally - is “talking in a common language about safeguards” and design, “includ[ing] civil society organisations, not just for consultation but also in specific cases of implementation”.

The UNDP’s role in enabling responsible DPI

UNDP has been playing a critical role in enabling this exponential equaliser.

“As I joined the UNDP team and began programming our safe and inclusive DPI efforts to reach everyone, including those at the last mile,” Massally notes, “I realised there is no other agency with the deep presence and relationships in countries to advocate for meaningful change and […] drive sustainable development and cooperation”.

UNDP’s mandate according to Massally is in thinking coherently and responsibly about safeguarding against the risks of DPI, a necessary reality behind the promises of Aadhaar or GovStack.

Given DPI’s interoperable nature, mitigating risks is not easy: “data is exchanged between systems that have their own rules and norms, meaning there are questions around where accountability sits when something goes wrong”.

To help countries navigate these challenges, UNDP along with OSET have been stewarding the DPI Safeguards initiative. This is a multistakeholder process working “to bring together diverse voices to develop a universal safeguards framework to guide DPI design and implementation around the world”.

 The programme aims to leverage the UNDP’s position as a neutral arbiter to build a risk framework – the first iteration of which is expected to be made public at the Summit of the Future in September 2024.

The initiative involves several working groups that have already produced an interim report. Massally notes: “The big question surrounding DPI is: how do we safeguard something that is definitionally broad and contextually diverse?”

The aim is not for the framework to be a compliance mechanism; it is intended to “shift behaviours, incentives and collective understanding of inclusion, safety practices and processes […] thereby building safeguards into the DNA of DPI not as compliance but as value additions”.

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Reducing, rather than amplifying, inequalities

Massally and the report both talk about the chief risk of DPI as “amplifying existing inequalities, [rather than] focusing on the people who really need more agency and support”.

As government technology advances and becomes more interconnected, those excluded by design – often the elderly, rural communities or minorities – may become even more disadvantaged, increasing the digital divide.

Other identified risks include privacy concerns and market distortions, or closed ecosystems, which would mean that the advantages of DPI would end up concentrated in the hands of just a few.

The report emphasises working on the basis of trust and equity. This means involving civil society partners throughout the design and implementation process of DPI, and approaching DPI “from a lifecycle perspective so that it is plug and play […] so that governments can contribute and use it based on whatever lifecycle is applicable to their country”.

A flexible approach to DPI prevents lock-in in favour of incremental maturity, meaning countries can learn lessons from others that they may not have considered in their initial design stages.

The report itself, and the framework that will accompany it, is agnostic to differences in approach and definitions. It is “designed to be a common starting point for considering risk mitigation in any digital public infrastructure”.

“It’s meant to be a living framework” Massally says.

How emerging technologies fit in

The lessons presented by the safeguards initiative will become only more pronounced as emerging technologies develop.

If done right, emerging technologies will “lower the adoption curve, making DPI even more powerful […] because it’s going to come with compute at a greater speed, and it’s going to create better and inclusive access to services that are being delivered through DPI”.

But these technologies are not without their own risks.

 Today “we are seeing that many AI use cases across developing countries are not scaling. This is because we have not really looked at how to equalise developing countries’ infrastructure around data, access and affordability of compute, together with human talent and broader trust and safety issues”.

For any digital policymaker, that laundry list of potential concerns is a lot to be getting on with.

But as the UN looks towards 2030, with technologies set to support delivery of over 80 per cent of the targets relating to the SDGs, the Universal DPI Safeguards framework may be set to pave the way not just from a DPI perspective, but in thinking more broadly about digital development too.

To read about GovInsider’s past coverage of DPI, click here.