India’s drive to globalize Digital Public Infrastructure: Time to take stock

By the time our presidency ended, at least a dozen countries had signed MoUs with the Indian government to assist with assessing what DPI they could deploy.

At the time, we had all patted ourselves on the back for having secured so many international commitments—not realizing that mere agreement to consider adopting DPI can hardly be treated as a sign of success. 

Without evidence of actual deployments, we should not have assumed that our DPI approach had actually gone global.

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Soon after we handed over the baton of the G20 presidency to Brazil, it became evident that they were not going to embrace our DPI agenda with as much gusto as we would have liked. 

They were pursuing their own priorities, and if we wanted the idea to survive, we would have to promote it ourselves. 

Over the course of 2024, thanks to the concerted efforts of many, the Global North slowly began warming to the idea. 

Various developed countries made commitments to fund DPI rollouts, and the Quad went so far as to announce a set of principles for the development and deployment of DPI in third countries.

When DPI emerged as a priority area in the Global Digital Compact, the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Technology launched a ‘safeguards’ initiative to develop a set of foundational and operational principles with which all DPI development had to conform. 

Finally, it seemed like the world was willing to go along with what we were proposing.

But despite these positive signals, it is actual deployments that count, and, as anyone who has tried it will tell you, rolling out DPI is a non-trivial endeavour.

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In the first place, the country looking to deploy DPI must identify the government department responsible for the project. 

Given the bureaucratic turf wars that come into play, this is not always as easy as it might seem. 

They then need to design the solution, which will require them to develop some basic internal capabilities as well as identify and engage suitable third parties to do the heavy lifting. 

Once the solution has been built, they will need to integrate it with their existing administrative systems and supervise its rollout to the public. 

This is a process that even countries with high state capacity—those which already have experience with digitizing government services—will find challenging. 

For developing countries embarking on digitization for the first time, it can be next to impossible to manage.

To address this problem, we came up with the idea of developing DPI as a packaged service (DaaS)—a suite of pre-packaged DPI building blocks offered as a cloud solution that anyone skilled in the art can combine into a suitable DPI solution. 

Done well, this would allow countries with small populations to enjoy the benefits of the DPI approach at an affordable cost, even if they lack the technical capabilities to develop it themselves.

Over 2024, we developed these alternative deployment models, built a global consensus around the idea of DPI and mobilized international support. 

We devised new ways to address local challenges and won the support of hyperscalers and systems integrators for the DaaS approach to DPI deployment. 

It’s time to take stock of our endeavours to see whether our efforts have borne fruit.

Let’s start by listing some of the DPI projects that have gone live since we started working on DPI globalization.

Last year, Madagascar rolled out an eCRVS system to provide its residents with legal identities. This DPI is already being used in 525 communes with the potential to reach 8.4 million people. 

Zambia has integrated a digital identity verification system into its electronic health record infrastructure that, as of September 2024, covers 400 health facilities in the country and 1 million people. 

Mozambique and Nigeria have both built multi-purpose, highly interoperable platforms that they can quickly deploy across different segments of the population to deliver a range of different health campaigns. 

Across the two countries, these platforms already cover nearly 10 million people. 

Thanks to a digital infrastructure project designed to improve targeting and avoid duplication, Liberia’s ‘bed-net’ campaign has reached 7 million people.

Several DPI projects have been initiated but will be properly launched over the course of the coming year. 

This includes Rwanda’s National Digital Agriculture value chain, which aims to improve resource allocation and subsidy targeting. 

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa plans to implement a cross-border instant payment system in the region that will likely go live in the first quarter of 2025. 

The Dominican Republic has built a digital citizen’s wallet for verifiable credentials (such as a driver’s licence), and Togo has launched a working pilot of a fast-payment system that is expected to go live nationwide over the course of the coming year.

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The most compelling call to action for the deployment of DPI has been the UNDP’s “50 in 5" campaign, which set a hard target of getting at least 50 new countries to deploy DPI over the course of the coming five years. 

When it was first announced, it felt like this was a wildly ambitious endeavour. But, given the pace at which DPI deployments are taking place all over the world, it has suddenly begun to feel much more achievable.

The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of ‘The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance’. His X handle is @matthan.