How to go from digital silos to inclusive digital public infrastructure

India is often considered a model for inclusive digital public infrastructure, or DPI — a network of digital platforms that enables governments to provide essential services to citizens. The country is home to Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity system, and its Unified Payments Interface, a real-time payment system that processes 15 billion transactions per month. But the country’s experience also raises important questions about the risks of exclusion in digital economies. “Inclusion must be by design.” --— CV Madhukar, CEO, Co-Develop At Devex World 2024, CV Madhukar, the CEO of Co-Develop, a global nonprofit that partners with countries to build safe and inclusive digital public infrastructure, remembered a friend in the Indian government telling him that using Aadhaar to distribute food rations was saving the government a lot of money. “I asked him, ‘How many people are being excluded?’” he recalled. “He says, ‘Actually, I don't have a clear number.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God, we need to investigate this.’” Madhukar, who was then at the Omidyar Network, began working closely with the Indian government to ensure the most vulnerable were not excluded from the system. “Inclusion must be by design,” Madhukar said. He called for a shift away from siloed digital platforms toward inclusive digital public infrastructure to support equitable access to essential services. Digital public infrastructure should be “a shared means to many ends,” Madhukar said, highlighting the benefits of public infrastructure that enables private innovation, like the internet and GPS have done. But instead, most digital processes have been siloed and duplicative. When a government agency wants to find a solution to a problem, they issue a request for proposals, hire a vendor to build a solution, then go through the same process for the next problem. “We didn’t build roads separately for school buses and separately for ambulances,” Madhukar said. Low- and middle-income countries face particular challenges developing inclusive and integrated digital public infrastructure. Citing a Gartner report, Madhukar noted that global spending on government technology is projected to reach $800 billion in 2024, with around 88% of that spending concentrated in just 30 high-income countries. The remaining 160 countries will share a mere 12% of that budget, leaving LMICs without a financially viable path to achieve the same level of digital maturity as wealthier nations, he said. “If we can't drop the price point for countries to build technology, we're all failing in our duties,” Madhukar said. Earlier this month, Co-Develop convened the Global DPI Summit in Cairo, Egypt, and last week, Co-Develop hosted a meeting on the sidelines of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings focused on the economics of DPI. Co-Develop has a clear message for the World Bank and others in the global development community: “Do not fund siloed solutions.” Madhukar also believes that DPI is at a pivotal moment. “In the ’90s, we had these landline telephones, and even then, inclusion was a big question for a lot of people in the development space,” he said. “And so the calculation we would do is, how much copper do we need to have to lay all these cables?” The advent of mobile phones then transformed connectivity, making it smarter, cheaper, and faster. Now, Madhukar believes, DPI could see a similar shift. “We're at that moment in digital transformation where we have to get the sort of switch from copper to mobile,” he said.