When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, whether or not governments had basic digital services in place often determined how well they could identify and reach people in need.
For example, the Togolese government was able to launch its cash transfer tool, Novissi, in just 10 days because it built on systems like a biometric population registry that were already set up. Harnessing the power of its digital public infrastructure, Togo would eventually send money to 25% of all adults in the country via digital means.
Countries that used digital databases for their social assistance programs during the pandemic reached more than half of their populations on average, while countries that did not reached only about 16%, according to data from a new World Bank report. The COVID-19 pandemic also highlighted the importance of global coordination around how these tools are designed, built, and governed.
Now, countries are coming together to share common approaches to building trusted, safe, and inclusive digital public infrastructure, or DPI. They’re also sharing knowledge around so-called digital public goods so that governments can adopt them and scale up their DPI much more quickly — which will in turn help them reach more people with services ranging from health care to food distribution to cash transfers.
Donors committed a total of $295 million to the cause during the 77th United Nations General Assembly. Big donors included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which committed $200 million; Norway, which committed $50 million; Germany with nearly $35 million; and the EU’s Horn of Africa Initiative, with nearly $10 million. Leaders from 15 countries committed to sharing digital public goods as well as their knowledge to help other countries build this infrastructure.
Digital public infrastructure is as vital in the 21st century “as railways and roads and bridges were for the 19th and 20th centuries,” said Achim Steiner, administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, which chaired an event during UNGA called The Future of Digital Cooperation.
“This area, using digital approaches, is probably the most helpful thing in all of development,” Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, said at the event.
The U.N. defines digital public goods as “open-source software, open data, open artificial intelligence models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable international and domestic laws, standards and best practices and do no harm.” They’re key to achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, particularly for low- and middle-income countries.
And many lower-income countries are leading the way in developing and sharing these goods.
When Sierra Leone in 2019 co-founded the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a U.N.-based effort that promotes digital public goods, it “affirmed the role that the least developed countries can play in digital cooperation,” Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio said at the event. Other members of the alliance include the government of Bangladesh; GitHub, a software repository for the open source community; and the Gates Foundation among others.
Sierra Leone has seen firsthand the value of secure digital solutions in times of crisis, Maada Bio said. For example, Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation developed OpenG2P, which enables large-scale cash transfers through digital bank accounts and mobile wallets. It emerged from the Sierra Leone Ebola Payments Program launched during the Ebola epidemic in 2014 to 2016. The software, which initially allowed the government to make bulk payments to front-line workers, now enables other governments and humanitarian agencies to deliver benefits.
Sierra Leone then registered it as a digital public good as part of the alliance’s DPG registry, a database of open-source solutions, in order to make it freely available for other countries to adopt as well. Any country, no matter its income level, can use goods from the registry.
This kind of digital cooperation changes the donor-recipient narrative that tends to dominate international development because low-income countries can be the pioneers in developing these technologies, said Liv Marte Nordhaug, co-lead of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, which co-hosted the event with UNDP.
“We are at a meeting point between strong demand, and more and more state-of-the-art, open-source solutions that are exactly what these countries need,” she told Devex.
Togo, for its part, is eager to share its Novissi technology “with the rest of the world so that we can show we can be part of the solution,” said Cina Lawson, Togo’s minister of digital economy and digital transformation.
“This area, using digital approaches, is probably the most helpful thing in all of development.”
— Bill Gates, co-chair, Gates Foundation
At the start of the pandemic, Togo’s government and its partners, including researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used artificial intelligence to analyze satellite imagery and call detail records in order to identify the poorest districts of the country, then used SMS technology to send people cash.
“It’s not always that others will come and help us,” Lawson said. “We can also help ourselves and help other countries in Africa and elsewhere.”
Ninety-nine percent of Estonia’s public services are based online, and it’s helping other countries follow a similar path.
“The more open, transparent, and digital a society is, the stronger the democracy, and the less we see corruption,” said Estonian President Alar Karis, whose ministry of foreign affairs is a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Countries that invest in digital public infrastructure are also better able to help hard-to-reach segments of society in times of crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change. That's proven true in Ukraine during Russia's invasion and Pakistan during its devastating floods.
Part of what makes the return on investment in digital public infrastructure so great is the fact that it leverages private sector investments in areas such as mobile phone infrastructure, Gates said at the event.
More can be done to fully realize the potential of these digital tools, from rolling out savings plans to collecting taxes in a broader and more consistent way, he said.
Gates also noted how India, whose national identification system, Aadhaar, is the world’s largest biometric database, is likely to emphasize the issue of digital public infrastructure when it assumes the Group of 20 presidency in December.
Individually, digital public goods add value, but when combined, they can help address complex problems at population scale, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of railways, communications, and electronics and information technology. For example, India’s vast COVID-19 vaccination effort was only possible because it was managed digitally using solutions that were set up ahead of the pandemic.
Vaishnaw’s role — in which he oversees both physical and digital infrastructure — demonstrates the way India thinks about infrastructure as a digital public good.
Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm and member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, has supported digital public goods and digital public infrastructure as part of its broader work on responsible technology.
For example, it’s invested in MOSIP, or the Modular Open Source Identity Platform, an India-based organization that has developed an open-source platform to help governments implement a digital ID much like India’s Aadhaar scheme.
Omidyar Network’s early investment in digital public infrastructure helped to support the kind of experimentation and advocacy needed to attract the larger-scale financing that is now flowing in, said Michele Lawrence Jawando, senior vice president at Omidyar Network.
“This was once something we had to prove, to say this was worthy, and now you see a lot more actors in this space,” she told Devex.
Omidyar Network has supported not just multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the U.N., but also civil society organizations like SMART Africa, in order to ensure that people are at the center of this push for digital infrastructure.
“We have to lead first by defining the kind of society we want,” Jawando said. “Then, we can say, how does digital technology help us get there?