Competing DPI models take diverse paths to common goals

Different models of digital public infrastructure are emerging as the concept takes hold in official government policies and technology deployments. But DPI success stories have come predominantly from outside of the world’s richest nations, and a new analysis from The Atlantic Council suggests that the models to follow come from low and middle-income countries, largely in the Global South.

Those countries, in contrast with Global North countries that have largely built atop legacy systems, have leapfrogged their northern neighbors with “novel indigenous systems with new technologies and best practices.” These include open standards and protocols making lower-income countries’ DPI systems more interoperable and inclusive, with federated architecture, in line with privacy by design principles.

A similar observation was made at the recent Global DPI Summit, DPI.Africa.com reports, with Africa’s ability to leapfrog traditional development methods by adopting new technologies like AI as it builds out DPI one of the key themes emerging from the event.

The optimism culminated in a call by Co-Develop CEO C.V. Madhuker at the three-day Summit in October for the 101 attending countries to each introduce a DPI solution in time for the 2025 meeting, GovInsider reports.

“Global South countries are rethinking how to balance public and private-sector involvement, regulations for interoperability, the appropriate role and limits of markets, how to create trust in institutions, and how to build consequentially inclusive digital government goods and services,” says the Atlantic Council.

The Council’s South Asia Center convened working groups of experts in digital government, trade, payments, foreign and industrial policy and the internet to discuss examples of DPI and offer policy recommendations. Papers on cybersecurity and financial inclusion accompany the brief on DPI models.

Models for DPI development

The brief reviews the India Stack, Brazil’s digital payments system and Estonia’s X-Road as examples of DPI. It then takes a close look at the role of payment systems in DPI, which are singled out as the clearest example of governments building public resources in an area that has traditionally been the exclusive domain of the private sector.

India Stack is often presented as the best model of DPI to copy, due to the unprecedented scale of its rollout and the gains it has delivered in legal status and financial inclusion. The latter is seen in the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) program introduced by the country’s central bank, which allowed more than 500 million people to open bank accounts by the end of last year.

The positive impact DPI can have on inclusion efforts in general is identified by GovInsider as one of the key takeaways from the Global DPI Summit.

The Indian model is based on a foundational ID and a set of connected applications, along with the connectivity and other resources for people to use one with the other.

Brazil’s model is even more centralized, the report argues, in terms of governance. The Atlantic Council holds up the country’s digital payments platform, Pix, as an example of a DPI project achieving impressive results.

Pix was launched in 2020 by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), and by the end of 2022 was being used for over 3 billion transactions per month. The platform has also driven down the price of payments, according to the report. The BCB owns and operates the platform, but also owns and operates the database used for identity verification, and regulates the system.

Estonia’s X-Road provides the infrastructure behind an ambitious digital government program that allowed half of voters in a 2023 election to cast their ballot from home. The system has been developed through public-private partnerships.

Bisoye Coker-Odusote, DG of Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), talked about the importance of including both local and international partners from the private sector in these partnerships.

“Technology evolves rapidly, and we need private sector partners to help us build capacity and transfer knowledge,” she said, as reported by DPI.Africa.com.

In contrast to the DPI development models used in India and Brazil, and even Nigeria, Estonia’s system has no single point of failure, the Atlantic Council report notes. X-Road utilizes a peer-to-peer architecture, and each ministry manages its own database.

The paper concludes by recommending governance that encourages competition and collaboration through public-private partnerships, along with rigorous evaluations of national readiness for digital transformation, including both key infrastructure like internet access and frameworks for privacy and cybersecurity. DPI design must be centered on users, and perhaps most important, the insights and experiences of those standing up DPI systems must be shared.

Other key takeaways from the event identified by GovInsider are DPI’s potential to solve not just national-level problems, but international ones, the importance of open and interoperable protocols and the benefits to regional integration. The definition of DPI is still evolving, however, making it a challenge to document.

The importance of open-source technologies was emphasized by Afrikanenda Foundation Deputy CEO Sabine Mensah not just for enabling the development and scale of DPI, but for doing so in a way that maintains digital sovereignty and data control.

Article Topics

digital inclusion  |  digital public infrastructure  |  financial inclusion  |  interoperability  |  open standards