How digital public infrastructure has become a vital tool for development

When Dilshad Alam, a 23-year-old chef in Delhi, opened a bank account last year, he did so using an app on his phone to digitally verify his identity. Linking his new account to his phone number also enabled him to start using the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, a digital payments system in India that allows users to send and receive money instantly from their phone. Alam is one of nearly half a billion people across India who have opened a bank account since 2011 — a surge that has made India one of the fastest-growing countries in terms of financial inclusion. This is in large part thanks to something known as India Stack: A set of interoperable digital systems that together form a digital public infrastructure, or DPI, enabling online access to essential services such as identity verification, digital payments, and data sharing. Supporters argue that the DPI model pioneered by countries such as India could help emerging economies to reduce poverty and boost economic growth — as well as offering a more collaborative, cost-effective approach to development at a time when foreign aid is shrinking. DPI is the digital equivalent of a road, explained Sanjay Jain, director of DPI at the Gates Foundation, which supports the development of DPI in emerging economies. “Everybody understands that roads are public goods: You don't restrict access to them,” he said. “They provide very broad support for development, for people to move around, for economies to grow.” DPI “helps get similar benefits,” he said. The SDG factor One of those benefits is increased financial inclusion. A lack of formal identity documents or access to physical bank branches, as well as the cost to the bank of manual verification and onboarding, restrict many people in emerging economies from opening bank accounts. Worldwide, bank account ownership in low- and middle-income countries increased from 42% in 2011 to 75% in 2024 according to the Global Findex Database 2025. Digital systems are cheaper, faster, and more accessible — bringing thousands into the formal financial system and helping to boost economic growth by tapping into previously untouched markets. Research shows that access to financial services boosts consumption, innovation, and job creation. The introduction of India Stack helped to increase account ownership in India from around 25% in 2008 to over 80% in 2023. Alam, who is originally from a small village in Bihar in eastern India, used to have to ask friends to store his salary in their bank accounts, he said. Now he receives his salary via UPI and pays his bills using an app on his phone. UPI has also allowed Alam, a migrant worker, to send money back home electronically, bypassing traditional fees. India’s efforts to link UPI with other payment systems across the world have reduced the cost of digital remittance transfers to 4.9% on $200, just above the Sustainable Development Goals target of under 3% by 2030. DPI has enhanced the ability of governments to send cash transfers, too, reducing corruption and leakages from social security schemes. This became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, which “really showed the fault line between countries that had done a good job of building resilient and interoperable digital infrastructure and those that had not,” said Robert Opp, chief digital officer at the United Nations Development Programme. Similarly, the digital footprint created by DPI can save governments money by helping to increase tax compliance. This improved efficiency can significantly boost countries’ gross domestic product. A 2023 UNDP report estimated that DPI could help low- and middle-income countries to grow their GDP by an additional 1% to 1.4% by 2030. But DPI is also helping to meet many of the SDGs in less obvious ways, improving outcomes in health and education and helping countries to meet gender equality and environmental targets. Women’s bank account ownership has nearly doubled since 2011, for example, enabling increased financial independence, economic opportunity, and decision-making power. In India, digitalized health records and instant identity verification facilitates faster access to medical care and verification of entitlements to the government insurance scheme, as well as providing real-time data for disease trend modeling and policymaking. And in Brazil, DPI is helping to meet climate goals. The Rural Environmental Registry is a national platform for self-reported land use, which, when linked to Brazil’s digital payments system, facilitates targeted climate-linked subsidies and environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, investments. The dynamic, interwoven benefits of DPI mean that its impact is often underestimated, said David Eaves, associate professor of digital government at University College London. For both physical and digital infrastructure, “it's actually quite hard to quantify the economic benefits,” he said. In collaboration with Diane Coyle at the University of Cambridge, Eaves is working on a new measurement framework to assess the dynamic impacts of DPI. As more and more countries look to invest in DPI, better ways of measuring its impact will become increasingly important for working out which factors lead to success, said Opp. Recreating inequality in the digital world In fact, poorly implemented DPI may have undesirable impacts. Some worry that DPI could widen the gap between those who are digitally literate and connected to the internet, and the 2.6 billion people worldwide still without internet access — often women and those living in rural areas. “It's actually relatively easy to implement digital architectures that exclude people,” said Opp, cutting them off from services if DPI becomes the primary point of access. To ensure that digital transformation is as inclusive as possible, UNDP is working on policies to increase digital access alongside the expansion of DPI — such as a project in Bangladesh that helps ensure the delivery of free public e-services to local populations. “You have to have technology brought to people in a way they can consume it, as opposed to the other way around,” said Opp. Artificial intelligence could help with inclusion, for example, by providing language translation or text-to-speech features, which would enable those who are illiterate to operate the apps. But it could also accelerate a divide between countries with the skill sets to incorporate these technologies and those without, warned Gates Foundation’s Jain. “AI represents a big discontinuity in how development is happening,” he said. If low-income countries “are not in a position to take advantage of AI, there’s a risk of them being left behind.” AI has also exacerbated concerns about data security and surveillance. DPI necessitates the collection of vast quantities of personal data, making it vulnerable to cyberattacks, data leaks, and weaponization by governments. UNDP works with countries to build certain safeguards in place alongside the development of DPI, such as data protection officers and multistakeholder oversight of privacy measures and data use. “The consideration of safeguards is not an add-on … it needs to be embedded,” said Opp. “Without those safeguards, at best you're risking accidental data leaks … and at worst, you're risking really malicious-intent usages.” Good governance also requires a foundation of good technology, said Arun Kumar Gurumurthy, chief strategy officer at Modular Open Source Identity Platform, or MOSIP, an open-source platform designed to help governments develop digital identity programs. “If the technology is poor, no policy will be enforceable,” he said. The design of MOSIP’s technology ensures that data cannot be misused by ensuring it “has to stay in an encrypted form,” said Gurumurthy, and automated logs are created of all activity. This means that no one administering the system has the ability to view personally identifiable data, and there is an oversight mechanism in place for all data use. The definition of DPI needs to be expanded to include good governance, argued UCL’s Eaves. People tend to “focus on ‘does the bridge exist, or does the bridge not exist?’” he said. “What we’re trying to get people to understand is it’s really only public infrastructure if it has governance built around it.” Part of Eaves’ research includes mapping DPI initiatives around the world — including how they are governed. “We’re trying to not just measure the technical systems, but we’re trying to measure the policy systems within which the infrastructure is embedded,” he said. This can help to identify and define norms around effective and ethical management of DPI, he said, which in turn would enable civil society organizations and international institutions to push for their adoption and challenge bad behavior. Transparency and collaboration Another way to encourage good governance is through open-source protocols, allowing civil society organizations to monitor what sort of data is collected and how it is used and stored. This transparency means “you can actually go and look under the hood and have an opinion on how they have been built,” said Liv Marte Nordhaug, who leads the secretariat of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, or DPGA, a multistakeholder initiative that aims to accelerate the attainment of the SDGs through open-source digital public goods. Open-source protocols also create an environment of collaboration and collective improvement, enabling countries to replicate and build upon existing technologies, legal frameworks, and policy approaches. “Each new implementation continues to contribute to our knowledge,” said Gurumurthy of MOSIP, which has so far partnered with 27 countries to build national digital identity programs. Open-source software is like a garden, he said: “The more you tend to it, the more you iterate, the more people you involve, the better and more robust technology starts to become.” DPGA is a collaborator in the 50-in-5 advocacy campaign, which aims to help 50 countries build DPI within five years by sharing technologies and best practices. What is most interesting about the campaign is that it cuts across all income levels and geographies, said Nordhaug, with emerging economies such as Brazil often leading the learning process and countries such as France and Singapore expressing interest in collaboration. “It's extremely refreshing to see learnings and best practice sharing and exchanges on a like-minded basis, because that doesn’t happen so often in development,” she said. Open source does not mean using a “cut-paste” approach though, said Jain. DPI needs to be customized for different country contexts to ensure sustainability and user trust, where countries “use the software as a starting point, and then they build their own rules,” he said. The role of the Gates Foundation as a donor is to help countries to “own their own story, their own journey,” he said. Knowledge sharing and replication are also more cost-effective than starting from scratch, Nordhaug pointed out. This would be a big draw for donors and could facilitate a shift away from inefficient funding of digital silos. As foreign aid budget cuts drastically change the donor landscape, Nordhaug is “optimistic” that this collaborative nature could represent a new approach to development. It is a reminder, she said, that “things don’t need to stop, and that collaboration is still possible — even in a pretty fragmented world.”