Investing in the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure: applying infrastructure thinking to governments’ top priorities
In March 2023, Co-Develop approved an investment to set up the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), housed at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B). CDPI supports governments to imagine, design, architect, and implement DPI, while helping disseminate “infrastructure thinking” worldwide.
The Question
Last spring, Co-Develop partnered with the research organization Artha Global to answer the question, “How can we enable governments to build and sustain digital public infrastructure (DPI) thoughtfully, with inclusion, safety, and equity baked into system design from the beginning?” After interviewing over 30 experts across open technologies providers, multilateral organizations, government officials, and academic and civil society networks, we published the summary of our findings here. In short, much of what is currently being provided by parties external to the government - the capacity to make design and technology decisions, manage vendors to implement those decisions, maintain secure systems, etc. - are precisely the skills that governments urgently desire to cultivate in-house.
Table 1: Provisioning expertise for DPI project implementation
Governments often rely on external vendors for critical technical capacity. While vendors' capacity is welcome in key phases (Development, Testing), governments have strongly indicated a desire to own the initial design phases of a DPI project.
We concluded our findings with an invitation to co-develop ways forward - and many of our partners responded. In particular, we collectively zero’d in on the “upstream” strategic technical capacity, mainly because of its knock-on effect on the “downstream” elements of operational capacity. So, the outline of an answer to our question began to form: tackle the upstream and focus on the strategic technical capacity that sets the direction of everything that follows.
The Power of Infrastructure Thinking in Building DPI
More specifically, the strategic technical capacity shared by countries such as Brazil, India, Estonia, and others deploying DPI is what we’re informally calling “infrastructure thinking.” That is, the ability to step away from building a bespoke solution for a single use case, and instead design and deploy reusable digital building blocks that can be mixed-and-matched to apply to multiple use cases. For example in Brazil, it’s not just one bank’s customers who can send and receive money amongst themselves, it’s 126 million Brazilians (76% of the adult population) who can make payments amongst themselves and to over 11 million companies - all due to Pix, a digital payments infrastructure that connects digital financial service providers.
It is this mindset shift to “infrastructure thinking”, this way of taking a problem and solving not just for that specific problem, but also for future problems, that we firmly believe should be embedded in public institutions.
The Need for a Center
So, why a Center? To institutionalize, and therefore accelerate, the dissemination of “infrastructure thinking” in strategic technical capacity worldwide. CDPI will leverage the experience of those who have successfully built and scaled DPI to help countries strategically craft technology architecture that operates as infrastructure.
CDPI was launched at the March G2P Connect workshop and is co-chaired by Dr. Pramod Varma, the former Chief Architect of India Stack, which includes Aadhaar, UPI, and Account Aggregator; and Dr. S. Rajagopalan, Founder-Director of the IIIT-B Innovation Centre, which aims at incubating and promoting innovations in ICT.
Their team of DPI experts will provide pro-bono advisory support in three key areas:
Technology Architecture Design - Respond to country requests to assist in the design of reusable DPI, including open technology standards, blueprints, and sandboxes countries can leverage to test and decide between architecture options;
Execution and Rollout Coaching - Through a “Residents Program”, train country leaders to create and sustain local expertise on DPI for specific country needs
Knowledge Sharing and Research - Share experiences and learnings through country-facing workshops and curation of research on DPI
Table 2: CDPI's role in supporting countries building in-house strategic technical capacity
From One to Many
Just a few weeks after its launch, CDPI is already engaging with over five countries across three continents in their DPI journeys. In the coming months and years, we aim to help seed more Centers for DPI, based in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, such that countries everywhere have closer access to “infrastructure thinking” that can be leveraged to build in-house strategic technical capacity for DPI. We welcome interest from the wider community to participate, whether that’s to co-fund a Center, to host a Center, or to offer relevant support and advice as we collectively work to build safe, equitable, and inclusive DPI.