Harnessing digital public infrastructure for service delivery

Imagine a mother in rural Rukungiri who, with just a smartphone and a national ID, can access health insurance, get agricultural subsidies, register her child’s birth, and receive notification of the next vaccination campaign, all without physically going to a government office. Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is a term that encompasses a collection of large or population-scale digital systems and technological infrastructure in service of people and society.

Of course, ICT-for-Development has been around for decades, but the DPI approach brings forth more coherence. So, imagine a road or a railway line as a piece of infrastructure that makes it possible to scale the provision of services to persons at the grassroots level. DPI is a collection of large-scale or population-scale digital systems that we can leverage for better service delivery.

By way of example, we have seen the transformative power of DPI for people (digital ID), money (mobile payments), and data (secure data exchanges) for economic opportunities and services to all. Statistics show that the Aadhar ID system in India delivered increased consumption of financial services by women who were previously left out of the economic system. We’ve also seen the Pix payment system in Brazil, Digital Vaccine Certificate in Sri Lanka, Digital ID System in Rwanda, which has been integrated into their online e-government services portal Irembo, to mention but a few.

With less than 5 years to the deadline on Agenda 2030, the biggest drivers for the development of DPIs include access, efficiency, and equity in aspects of financial inclusion, economic empowerment, health, and agriculture that meet the needs of a population, plus a myriad of incentives under the global agenda. There is no doubt that some scholars look at DPI as the interface for the operation of the Digital Public Goods (DPGs) under the SGD agenda, and that it will play an important role in ensuring sustainable and inclusive societies. So we have a responsibility to render DPIs useful, secure, safe, and inclusive for the common good. This means recognising its transformative potential, and the resultant risks like mass system-wide surveillance and data breaches, and the undesired residuals.

To that end, proper and transparent governance is essential to build trust, unlock potential, and ensure that DPIs serve humanity, preventing rogue, expensive, and useless infrastructure that doesn’t deliver as intended. Governance ensures that we don’t expend resources towards systems that exacerbate inequalities and exclusion because a digital ID without inclusion is simply a barcode for the privileged. We ought to design, develop, and deploy the technology as a vehicle for values-based governance.

But while at it, safeguards become fundamental in ensuring that people aren’t forced to trade off their human rights and security for inclusion and service delivery. The role of safeguards, equal to that of a firewall which prevents systems from breach, can’t be overstated. They form the backbone that upholds resilience, equity, and trust, ensuring a thriving and secure digital future. As a country, we are going to need to localise fundamental and operational safeguards benchmarking on what has worked the world over and embedding them in the design and implementation journey. With the right safeguards, we shall have DPI that respects rights and protects the planet.

We also need to answer the conundrum of who gets to fund the development of DPI. Should it be the government, the private sector, or both through a public-private partnership (PPP)? Governments are usually resource-constrained given the various priorities they have to deal with, but then again, private entities are fashioned with a for-profit goal, meaning rights run the risk of taking the back seat. So, how do we align and negotiate fair private-public partnerships for the sole purpose of funding? Alternatively, lobbying for strong votes at the budgetary level towards DPI development is key.

As I take leave of this matter, DPI can propel us from middle or low-income to high income, unlock inclusivity, climate transition, equitable just and sustainable value but a recent High Court decision in Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) and 2 Ors v. Attorney General & Anor, High Court Miscellaneous Cause No. 0086 of 2022 (June 10, 2025) confirms that the Ugandan ID is not a ‘digital ID’. This shows that we need more effort to align the system to support foundational DPI modeling to derive benefit.

We also need electricity, strong cybersecurity, ubiquitous broadband access, digital literacy, needs assessment within the citizenry, continued growth of the workforce and also need to have the policy choices translate into an architectural decision, so that the values embedded in policy then come out in the code that underlies some of these digital technologies. The development of technology is not linear, and we don’t have time given the pace of development and adoption in this space. So, Uganda should think of its most impactful and value-unlocking DPI first.