Overview
Among its advocates, digital public infrastructure (DPI) is a panacea for development, growth and progress. The scale and diversity of its claimed impacts came through strongly at the 2024 Global DPI Summit in Cairo (organised by Co-Develop with support from UNDP, ITU, Gates Foundation among others), with diverse claims that DPI can (or will?) empower citizens, drive digital transformation, enable inclusive global growth, safeguard digital sovereignty, bring equitable global progress, transform learning, harness the full potential of technology for a better future, and transforms society, and so on.1
DPI has become firmly embedded within development, not the least as a proposed solution to help realise the SDGs. A month before the Global DPI Summit, in September 2024, the Global Digital Compact (GDC) which was signed by member states also declared the intention of the UN through the Office of the Tech Envoy through the launch of the DPI safeguards initiative, to support members states and the global DPI ecosystem to develop strategies and policies to implement DPIs safely. The UNDP is pushing through the safeguards initiatives for DPI along with building governance frameworks for digital identity and data exchanges. In all of this momentum around DPI (see uptick on Google trends below), there is little or no evidence on the impact of DPI on inclusion, efficiency, competition or sovereignty nor is there assessments of cost of building DPI vs other technologies.
Figure 1: A Google Trends graph of the relative number of searches related to ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’ over time
The origin stories of the current global DPI agenda are closely linked to India’s experience with Aadhar (digital identity) and UPI (digital payments), packaged later as India Stack and now Citizen Stack. India’s DPI story is presented as a Global South-led agenda for digital development as an alternative to big tech and US/China dominance, and open source and interoperable software as the foundations for preventing vendor lock-in and enhancing digital sovereignty.
The global ecosystem of DPI supply has successfully established DPIs as the silver bullet solution to all of society’s problems at a time where the world is in unprecedented conflict, and when development goals as defined in the sustainable development goals (SDGs) are far from being met. Simultaneously, the digital infrastructures being built in the other parts of the world - which may not be identified with the dominant model (also referred to as the Co-Develop, the Gates Foundation and/or Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI) framework throughout this report) - are being enveloped in the same narrative, such as Estonia’s e-government strategy, or Germany’s GovStack and Brazil’s payments platform PIX. This is problematic, since their notions of publicness (public control and public good), role of private sector, mechanisms for implementation and governance are all different, but the broad-strokes “DPI” language doesn’t allow for engaging with nuances. This is especially worrying since Europe is also pursuing a “Euro-stack” approach as a way to address competition, innovation and sovereignty.
Amidst these big narratives about what DPI can and will achieve, both the products that encompass the “DPI” and the processes that drive its global export need to be examined carefully to understand whether the promise of the technologies - last mile access, innovation and competition, interoperability through transparent and accountable processes of adoption - are being met.
India’s G20 presidency (2023) is widely considered to be an inflection point in the DPI agenda. Since then there’s been a sharp increase in global attention to and discussion of the value of DPI in advancing global development, and a surge in funding for advocacy and building of these technologies. There are agreements to build infrastructures through efforts such as 50in5 supported by innovative funding mechanisms such as Co-Develop, a global non-profit fund, and new approaches that offer DPI as a packaged solution. The risks emerging from DPI are packaged into safeguards/guard rails and focus on how to mitigate its harms, e.g. through safeguards (e.g. UNDP DPI safeguard hub), but do not question the value of DPI in itself. Even the pre-conditions to DPI such as connectivity, are mentioned as talking points versus discussions on how to enable it. DPI has made its way into bilateral engagements led by India (with France, US, UK and EU) as well as the Global Digital Compact. Simultaneously, there’s also a growing Euro-centric narrative anchored on digital sovereignty, which problematically conflates digital commons with DPI, as envisioned and implemented in India, and does not engage with the decade-long critiques of India’s efforts and related European efforts.
Further, within the implementation of DPI in India, beyond concerns on privacy and inclusion which are chronicled to some extent, we see new issues also emerging. For instance, vertical monopolies have emerged across the different points of the stack that reinforce old power structures in new areas such as PhonePe (owned by Walmart) and Google’s [hold of India’s payments](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034443/india-upi-usage-by-platform/#:~:text=In the third quarter of,of UPI adoption in India.) transactions (accounting for over 81% of the total transaction volume, with Paytm a distant third). This suggests that the lack of competition at the card network layer (Visa, Mastercard) that UPI intended to replace has instead been displaced to the payment application layer. In addition, UPI and DPI systems are built on top of Big Tech cloud infrastructure. There is also no clear evidence of the value of DPIs globally or from India, except for potentially problematic or large numbers that have not necessarily been substantiated. Beyond this, there are questions on institutional accountability in India, and where power to build and govern DPIs lies.
Through the supply push of DPI globally, there are growing concerns about the pace of DPI development and deployment, and whether there are reasonable and necessary frictions that take into account the situational analysis of where these technologies are being exported. For instance, in Ethiopia, there are fears of the use of digital ID for ethnic profiling. There is also a push to go to smaller countries, which while needing digital infrastructure, do not have the governmental capacity, innovation environment, data protection legislations or civil society to meaningfully use, govern or hold digital infrastructures accountable.
First in India, and now in other parts of the world, DPI is seen as an apolitical, technological solution to developing needs that reduces the cost of investment in technologies through “reusable tech”. However, the builders and propagators of DPI are unmindful of the implications of potent technologies in the hands of unreliable actors, where weak governance and commercial capture can lead to significant harms. The perpetuation of this techno-solutionism is irresponsible at best, and dangerous at worst. Supported by relatively abundant philanthropic capital from a few key organisations to fund the large supply machinery, and multilateral institutions to validate the narrative, the DPI juggernaut pushes through political, bureaucratic and most critically democratic processes in countries big and small, with little time or interest to reflect the costs and impact of implementation.
It is critical to engage with the evolution of DPIs in an all-encompassing way to evaluate whether DPIs have actually delivered on stated goals, and its impact on vulnerable groups such as migrants/refugees especially critical in the context of Europe right now. Reflecting on the discourses around DPI in Europe, a worry emerges that the cast of characters, and the core ideology driving DPIs is the same - and now with global attention and interest. As we discuss further in this report, the India model is whitewashed by time and philanthropic capital. Looking to Europe, we find little to no evidence to suggest that things might be different as the DPI supply push moves to global implementation. Similar issues around the obfuscation of difficult political issues, potential exclusionary and unequal effects - on people and in the private sector, and challenges to democratic accountability arguably remain.
Figure 2: Authors’ visualisation of the emergence and obfuscation of potential DPI-related harms
This paper investigates three critical questions about DPI - or as it is increasingly discussed as, the DPI approach - as a global product or agenda: