DPI-as-a-Packaged Solution marks major milestone with Trinidad and Tobago rollout

The first ever implementation of DaaS — DPI-as-a-Packaged Solution — is going live in Trinidad and Tobago in a test case that will be closely observed by its advocates and users.

The roll out is seen as a milestone step in showcasing how DaaS can accelerate the adoption of digital public infrastructure as its proponents claim DaaS can “exponentially increase” benefits to society in a relatively short space of time.

Trinidad and Tobago will implement a verifiable credentials stack at a national scale over the next six months. This rapid timeline to deploy a national-scale DPI is touted as one of the major selling points of DaaS. Verifiable credentials are expected to help the Caribbean country’s graduates apply for jobs, supporting workforce development and as a bridgehead for ongoing digital transformation efforts.

“At MOSIP we believe in empowering users and residents with control over their credentials and identity,” said SasiKumar Ganesan, MOSIP’s head of engineering, in a post on LinkedIn. “This milestone in Trinidad and Tobago is just the beginning, showcasing how users will have more control and identity in the future,” he continued.

The DaaS implementation in Trinidad and Tobago is led by iGovTT, a local company supporting the country’s ICT, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation; with Deloitte as the service provider; INJI and the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) providing the digital public good (DPG); and Co-Develop, a global nonprofit fund, as the funder.

Trinidad and Tobago’s DPI push is under the umbrella of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and its Accelerator Lab, which is part of a global UN initiative that works to address development issues through a combination of local technologies, digital tools, and cross-sector collaboration. A delegation of officials from Trinidad and Tobago visited India’s MeitY in 2023 to learn about the India Stack and digital public infrastructure developed in the country.

As a packaged solution DaaS aims to rapidly deploy DPI by avoiding procurement routes and upgrading existing infrastructure. The emphasis on non-procurement is to avoid delays, as governmental procurement can involve necessarily lengthy processes, when simple upgrades to existing systems can be significantly faster.

In a post on the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure, DaaS is briefed as infrastructure built for population-scale from “day one” and that it can reach full coverage “in a matter of months.”

From a Carnegie paper to national roll-out and increasing traction 

The DaaS concept started on “paper” with an article co-written by Aadhaar and India Stack architect Pramod Varma and  published on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website. That was titled “The Future of Digital Public Infrastructure: A Thesis for Rapid Global Adoption.”

The thesis tackled the heretofore “high friction, high investment and high time-commitment” that DPI rollouts can take, and posited a simpler and more rapid deployment. It seeks to bypass obstacles such as hiring and capacity challenges, vendor issues, and timelines of procurement and funding — and create something prepackaged for deployment at speed and scale.

In a presentation CDPI’s chief strategy officer Kamya Chandra emphasized the importance of seeing DPI as an ecosystem rather than as single, isolated efforts, and talked through how DaaS could play a role in “accelerating innovation” and addressing key challenges in digital transformation and global governance — a video of the presentation can be found here.

In addition, the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure has further information including a breakdown of how DaaS has multiple operational modules, which will be relevant to countries and governments looking for particular applications. For example, countries can choose to join the funded DaaS program to receive pre-packaged offerings of their chosen product (DPG). There are also pre-existing vendors who have been trained under the DaaS program by the DPG owner, which is another module type.

MOSIP has a PDF presentation going through the core tenets of DaaS and how it simplifies DPI implementation, which can be viewed here.

Article Topics

Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI)  |  DaaS (DPI-as-a-Packaged Solution)  |  digital ID  |  digital public infrastructure  |  Inji digital wallet  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  Trinidad and Tobago  |  UNDP  |  verifiable credentials