Even digital public goods that are in wide demand, and have proven their potential to address development needs in multiple countries, struggle to attract the contributions and financial support required to maintain and evolve over time. This blog considers how to change that through coordinated, sustainable grant funding. This is the first in a series of blogs exploring how to finance the digital public goods ecosystem.

In the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) we believe that digital public goods (DPGs)* are essential to unlocking the full potential of digital technologies to enhance human welfare at scale. Their relevance to one or multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs), combined with their adoptability and adaptability, allows DPGs to strengthen international digital cooperation. Stakeholders can join forces to support solutions that address many of today’s greatest global challenges in critical areas such as health, education and climate change. DPGs are of particular importance for resource constrained countries looking to accelerate development through improving access to digital services.

Still, precisely due to their nature as “public goods” – which ensures that no one can prevent others from benefiting from them – DPGs can be difficult to fund through market mechanisms, and some of them should not have to prioritise generating profit.

Sustainable funding for the public good 

The DPGA believes that DPGs with the highest potential to accelerate attainment of the SDGs in multiple countries should be sustainably funded in order to maximise the global public good. 

We believe that sustainable grant funding is most critical for “infrastructural” DPGs that can be deployed as relevant parts of a country’s foundational or functional digital public infrastructures (DPIs). DPIs tend to be cross-sectorally enabling, serving as the rails that public and private service delivery can run on. They can therefore have a disproportionately positive impact on achieving the SDGs. Conversely, when DPIs are not well-designed and well-implemented, they can do harm to the economy and society. It is in the global public interest that they are built to serve society’s poor and marginalised groups, safeguard human rights, and enable a diverse and flourishing economic ecosystem. Stable grant funding for state-of-the-art infrastructural DPGs can help ensure this.

Building out ecosystems with infrastructural DPGs at the core

Sustainably funded infrastructural DPGs can become a reliable core for broader ecosystems through community building:

• For the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) core code management and evolution is fully funded by grants from a group of philanthropic and bilateral donors.** This enables the team responsible for managing and evolving the generic platform to focus exclusively on maximising utility for those the platform is designed to serve – in this case, countries in need of foundational digital identity systems.
• Similarly backed by grant funding for core code development and maintenance, the team behind District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) has prioritised community building within and between the 70+ countries that have adopted the software, enabling countries to share improvements and related innovations. This is best exemplified by Sri Lanka, the first country in the world to use DHIS2 for COVID-19 surveillance, who shared this groundbreaking innovation with the global DHIS2 community. Today, this system is operational in 38 countries and is under development in fourteen more.
• The data exchange layer X-Road, which is publicly funded by NIIS members (currently Estonia and Finland), demonstrates how infrastructural DPGs can use community building to advance both the core technology and the  quality of downstream deployments. The X-Road Community connects a diverse group of individuals and allows anyone to contribute to the open-source technology. This community-based support and knowledge-sharing helps local vendors around the world build the expertise needed to provide quality services to stakeholders adopting the technology.

More and better coordinated funding needed

Since the creation of the DPGA in 2019, we have learned that while many stakeholders are individually doing great work that can help create a comprehensive and vibrant ecosystem built around infrastructural DPGs, it remains too limited and fragmented to usher in a paradigm shift. For that to happen, we must mobilise more resources both to strengthen existing financing instruments and to create new ones, while ensuring cross-coordination throughout different ecosystem-parts. The magnitude of this task is simply too large and complex in nature for any single entity to address all the challenges by itself.

As a multi-stakeholder alliance dedicated to the advancement of digital public goods, the DPGA is well placed to help build a partnership-oriented and coordinated funding model with infrastructural digital public goods at the core. We look forward to working with other stakeholders to shape this in the coming months. 

The next part in this blog series

Funding infrastructural DPGs so that they can be built and maintained over time as generic “state-of-the art”, dependable and trustworthy technologies, is a critical first step to realising their full impact-potential. However, a sustainable funding model must also support countries to assess, implement and maintain DPGs. We will write about funding needs for country technical assistance in the next part of this blog series.

*Endorsed by the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the DPGA defines digital public goods as: “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs.”

**Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, Tata Trusts and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

Follow us on Twitter.
Join our mailing list.
Nominate digital public goods.

Cover Image: Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash

In alignment with the UN Secretary-General’s 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, we define digital public goods (DPGs) as open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm and are of high relevance for attaining the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Many types of digital technologies and content – from data to apps, data visualisation tools to educational curricula – could accelerate achievement of the SDGs. However, it is only if they are freely and openly available, with minimal restrictions on how they can be distributed, adapted and reused that we can think of them as “digital public goods”. 

Why Open Source? 

Not all open source projects are digital public goods, but all digital public goods must be open source. 

Open source is broadly defined as when the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. This is a crucial part of digital public goods where, for example, software, content and data must be accessible independently of any particular vendor and allow software, data and content to be freely used, modified, and shared. There are many existing open licenses, and the choice of license has implications on how the code, data or content can be reused. We’ll therefore dig deeper into the process of identifying which “approved” licenses were included in the DPG Standard, and why, in our next blog post. In this post we present an overview of the case for open source. 

“Open” ensures the software, data, AI model, standard or content we’re working with can be adopted, scaled and adapted in various country contexts. It also ensures transparency, can contribute to project sustainability, and reduces the risk of vendor lock-in. Below we describe each of these benefits in turn. 

Adoptability, Scalability & Adaptability 

For digital public goods to scale across markets, they must be freely adoptable and adaptable. 

For example, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), a technology that helps governments implement a foundational ID, can be freely adopted by countries who can adapt the open software to fit their local needs. This can help build long-term ownership and agency within each implementing country and can also allow the platform to scale over time across many countries. 

Transparency & Sustainability 

Open source licensing allows a digital public goods’ code base to be independently scrutinized and audited. This can increase accountability and facilitate discourse about the steps that have been taken to design technologies that are inclusive and do no harm. 

Having a transparent code base can also allow for greater sustainability. As each implementing country adapts or iterates on the code, these changes can be shared back to help evolve and better the source code. 

Vendor Lock-In 

It can be costly to obtain licenses from vendors. This can also cause ‘lock-in’, meaning that a government or organization is beholden to that vendor for relevant service or maintenance for the duration of the contract. Additionally, state-owned solutions could suffer from politicization of access, where states may choose to give permission to their allies over others, making access vulnerable to geopolitical shifts and tensions. 

While the cost of implementing and configuring open source software is often comparable to purchasing a license, open source offers more control and independence and reduces the risk of vendor or political lock-in. This makes it easier for governments in particular to plan their digital futures in a holistic and long-term way.

Finally, an open approach to digital development can help to increase collaboration and resource mobilization in the digital development community, avoid duplicating work that has already been done, and attract new investors and contributors to initiatives with high-impact potential. This allows programs to maximize their resources — and ultimately their impact — through open standards, open data, open source technologies and open innovation.

Open source is a necessary condition for any technology to be considered a digital public good. It enables sharing, reuse and adaptation to suit local needs. And, combined with the right support and funding structures, open source represents an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally alter power balances in international development. This means more creation and iteration can happen locally; trust in technology can be built through agency and transparency; and, best practices and learnings can be shared across geographical, institutional and expertise borders. We believe this is critical to advancing a more equitable world and is why open source is fundamental to the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).

Learn more about the Digital Public Goods Alliance

Join our mailing list.

Follow us on Twitter @DPGAlliance.

Nominate digital public goods through this form.