Digital public infrastructure for resilience in fragile contexts
SOURCE: BROOKINGS
George Ingram and Jacob Taylor
Fragile states face a heightened dilemma when it comes to digital infrastructure: Technologies like digital identification (ID) and real-time payment systems can help deliver lifesaving services and build state capacity amid instability, yet their deployment risks reinforcing the exclusion of vulnerable populations or empowering abusive regimes. An enduring question for policymakers and digital transformation experts—only accentuated in a world of shrinking development assistance budgets—is how to build digital systems in a way that helps strengthen state capacity while protecting citizens from state overreach.
Digital public infrastructure (DPI), an emerging approach to building society-wide digital systems for ID, payments, and data exchange, may offer new answers. By emphasizing the development of adaptable and interoperable “horizontal” layers of foundational digital systems, paired with regulation and governance to ensure social inclusion and public accountability, DPI has the potential to support rapid humanitarian response through digital cash transfers directed to intended beneficiaries, while laying the groundwork for longer-term market-making activities and institutional recovery over time (e.g., through secure and data-driven tax systems). Privacy-preserving design elements of DPI systems, including federated data storage, tokenization, and consent mechanisms, have the potential to increase citizen protections against risks of state abuse.