Inclusive digital infrastructure can help achieve the SDGs. Here's how

Digital technology permeates today’s society. From communicating across borders to delivering essential services, it is transforming how people go about their daily lives and how governments function. Yet to bring about meaningful society-wide impact, this transformation should be safe, trusted and inclusive.

The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the tremendous potential of digitalization. Marked by the uptick in digital government-to-people payments and the demand for digital solutions from governments, more and more countries are adopting and adapting to digital technology.

Due to increasing demand, in 2020 alone, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) supported the implementation of more than 500 digital solutions around the world. In Ukraine, amidst the ongoing war, the government is harnessing digital technology to ensure continuity of public service delivery for its people. Besides improving efficiency, digitalization helps to reduce costs and ensure that the most vulnerable people in society also benefit.

Digital transformation is central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By targeting food and energy security through innovative digital approaches, the global community can work to elevate 2.4 billion lives from the grip of hunger and 800 million more from extreme poverty.

As nations strive towards these global goals, attention now coalesces on digital public goods (DPGs): open-source, interoperable digital solutions that can be effectively leveraged to build the much-needed digital public infrastructure (DPI) to ensure society-wide benefits. Built inclusively with a human-centred approach, digital public infrastructure can supercharge delivery of these goals to benefit everyone, everywhere.

The SDGs presents humanity with a complex jigsaw puzzle full of acronyms and initialisms. There are institutions and governments, software, regulation, rights and of course people. There are private problems and structural imbalances. There are needs, risks, opportunities – and inescapably, the ticking of a clock.

DPGs can steer us in the right direction, and meshed together can form the basis of a DPI with even greater potential to address today’s societal problems and help to mitigate future ones. These DPGs can be altered, refined and reused. They are sharable, improvable and they are resilient.

Countries are innovating and transforming practices by adopting and adapting DPGs. DPGs (such as digital payments solutions, data transfer protocols or digital health services) can be incorporated to improve public service delivery in a safe, trusted and inclusive way. Correctly assembled, DPGs can build a digital public infrastructure that is powerful enough to deliver society-wide impact for current and future generations.

The inherent openness of DPGs means they are socially oriented. They can be customized to meet a country’s specific needs and context, whilst respecting the agency of the implementing country. By their design, DPGs can decrease implementation costs, effort and time. And crucially, by building solutions collaboratively, they preclude the emergence of any future tech monopolies.

Openness also confers another priceless quality – scalability. Proprietary digital solutions by their nature tend to resist open collaboration and information sharing which can hinder scaling. However as observed with today’s combination of global challenges, humanity requires swiftly scalable solutions to respond to and anticipate new challenges.

Digital public goods can facilitate knowledge exchange between countries, by sharing the blueprints of their development, as well as experiential learnings from other countries. This in turn allows for replication of solutions – and success – with each country’s own context. The answer to unlocking digital transformation lies in coming together and sharing insights to customize and improve DPGs toward building the inclusive digital public infrastructure of tomorrow.

Today, this work has already begun. Below are four initiatives from around the world that highlight the power of digital cooperation embedded with inclusivity and resilience.

Many of these initiatives are built collaboratively with UNDP and countries themselves, so they can build their digital infrastructure in ways that can support robust economies, more resilient communities and empowered citizens.

These firebrand initiatives demonstrate how 21st century challenges are being met by rising 21st century digital solutions. Interoperable DPGs will compound and form safe, trusted and inclusive infrastructure that delivers whole-of-society transformation in our time. Through a digital mindset of cooperation, knowledge sharing and sustainable finance solutions, the tools to build resilient digital inclusivity already lie within our grasp.