Digital Public Infrastructure Map helps governments to understand the global state of play

Earlier this year, David Eaves launched the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) map, a tool designed to provide resources for researchers, policymakers, and builders of DPI on the global state of play.

Built using data from 132 countries, the map itself contains a repository of DPI deployments, a measurement framework for assessing DPI systems in a particular country, and insights on the current state of DPI.

The launch of the map is timely. September saw 193 member states adopt the Global Digital Compact at the UN Summit of the Future in New York, which recognised the potential of DPI in promoting inclusive digital transformation and achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

The Global DPI Summit, hosted just a couple of weeks later in Cairo, picked up where the Summit of the Future left off, placing “seven big bets” on the future of DPI in 2025.

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Why now?

For those not actively working on DPI, it can feel that all this has come at once.

To the question, “Why now”, Eaves, who is Co-Deputy Director and Associate Professor in Digital Government at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), says: “It’s something of a 20-year overnight success”.

Eaves points out that some countries have been talking about DPI for at least 15 years just under  different names.

While the nomenclature may have evolved, Eaves’s own engagement with the space is a decade and a half old too.

“Fifteen years ago, I remember speaking to a group of privacy commissioners about Open Data in Canada”, he says. “I found that governments were thinking about digital and data as a replacement for photocopiers, rather than engaging with it all the way down the stack”.

And so, he too began to think about this exact challenge: not trying to force things into the photocopier but thinking about whole-of-government as an interoperable “stack”.

A couple of years later, while convening digital service teams for seminars when he was teaching at Harvard, Eaves consistently began to run into a challenge in inviting speakers from Estonia and India.

Despite their successes in digital government, it was often tricky to find specific people to invite because these countries did not seem to have large digital teams.

Digging into this further, Eaves went on to put together one of the first case studies on India’s Aadhaar (the digital identity component of the famed India Stack), realising the capacity for it to work at scale.

Fast forward to the present day.

With both India and Brazil highlighting their DPI-at-scale efforts at the G20, and countries like Ukraine – using the same X-Road data exchange layer as Estonia – putting to bed detractions that DPI can only be successful in small Baltic countries, it was the perfect atmosphere for the first efforts at mapping who is using DPI, and how.

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Understanding the Global DPI space

Our conversation moves on to the findings of his research. Simply put, “there is more DPI out there than we thought”.

“We shouldn’t have been surprised at how much there is”, Eaves says, since the needs that DPI serves “are the core needs of the state – to enable an economy you need to provide provision and value exchange”. The data itself is focused on ID systems (57 around the world), payment systems (93) and data exchanges (103).

“Over 50 national governments have committed to build national-scale digital public infrastructure in the coming years,” the DPI Map website claims.

I ask Eaves what the motivations might be for a country developing DPI. He identifies three: an economic development impetus, a regulatory impetus, and for the protection of sovereignty.

“A DPI project like India’s Stack is almost purely driven by development goals: they are using public infrastructure to improve their agricultural stack, for example,” Eaves continues.

“If the US was to build DPI, it might be regulatory driven instead”.

A focus on each of these would naturally result in different DPI, with different characteristics, and what makes DPI particularly interesting according to Eaves’s map is that the Global South is currently further along than the Global North.

“It’s creating compelling dynamics that people are wrestling with, exposing some of the weaknesses of the international order and manages debates” in a way that might serve as a lesson for discussing future innovations like climate tech.

Defining DPI

The Indian agricultural example also illustrates a second key finding: a lack of a clear definition right now about what exactly counts as DPI. “It is clear that ID, payments and data exchange is table stakes,” hence the focus of the map on these three components.

Other organisations are defining DPI more broadly: the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure, for instance, includes open protocols and networks for accessing goods and services, such as India’s open ecommerce networks, as a key DPI pillar.

But beyond that, Eaves talks about a distinction he’s been wrestling with between digital public infrastructure and digital government infrastructure, a nuance that revolves around the question of what is public and what is private.

There are ramifications here for different sectors: something like digital healthcare might be a public good in one country and private in another. For more on this, an earlier GovInsider piece discussed the emerging debate on the various definitions of DPI.

To this end, I push Eaves on how much countries can really learn from each other on DPI, given that different considerations that might influence the composition of a DPI stack.

His answer, is that as so often with digital government, it’s clear that the technology is the easy part, and the governance is much more wicked. Here, governments can learn from each other.

Common safeguards, unique contexts

There are components of digitisation that all governments must engage with, he adds.

“Census bureaus happen in all types of countries from autocratic to democratic”, for example, “and there are commonly accepted good practices which you cannot deviate from”.

Eaves talks about an article he wrote a decade ago on Canada’s attempts to remove a long-form component of their national census, impacting data quality and prompting protests in the country. Just like a census, a DPI stack will have common guardrails for all countries.

Looking ahead, it is clear that safeguards are going to be one of the key themes of next year, as will be the emergence of open-source DPI through the likes of MOSIP and Mojaloop.

For Eaves and his map, the priority will be scaling its coverage to the entire world beyond the 132 countries currently in its dataset.

This will help facilitate those conversations about safeguards in such a way that recognises the unique landscape of each country, ensuring that the next 50 countries to build their stacks do so in a way that continues to prioritise their citizens.

Luke Cavanaugh holds a Master’s in Global Affairs from the Schwarzman Scholars programme at Tsinghua University, Beijing and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge. He has recently worked for StateUp, as part of the ITU Team working on GovStack, and sits on the Global Visionaries Board of the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union.