Digital futures: Infrastructure for equity, inclusivity, and sustainability

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou FREng chaired our recent Frontiers symposium on Digital Public Infrastructure – here she discusses the key issues raised.

As another generation that has been raised on the internet comes of age, it is easy to overlook how many still lack access to this technology. More than 67% of the global population – 5.4 billion people – are estimated to use the internet in 2023. That figure has increased rapidly since 2018, yet 2.6 billion people are still largely unable to access the digital world many of us take for granted. This includes access to public resources that are central to health, economic opportunity, and social inclusion. This digital thread that connects a country’s population to its government, financial institutions, healthcare and more can be compared to a road network, providing individuals access to key services and opportunities. 

The term Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) was coined to describe this concept, and this rapidly evolving field has spurred important conversations on how digital empowerment can improve public service delivery, sustainable development, and quality of life.

Engineering DPI solutions was the central topic of the recent Frontiers symposium held at the International Institute for Information Technology – Bangalore (IIITB) in India. To ensure multi-disciplinary perspectives, we assembled over 70 researchers and professionals from industry, academia, and the public sector to delve into the fundamental challenges surrounding DPI. Our goal was to foster solutions-focused approaches that would enable sustainable development through digital access.

All 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can in some way be progressed through investment and acceleration of DPI. DPI supports citizen empowerment towards sustainable consumption, climate action, safe and decent employment, legal access and more. Following on from the symposium in July, six projects have been awarded seed funding to explore this connection further, including an initiative in Nepal that aims to test nomadic network boxes that are designed to bring rural communities online and within reach of crucial digital services. This illustrates a key hurdle to the transformative impact of DPI: the gap in internet access for marginalised communities that inhibits social inclusion and equality. DPI can drive social inclusion but must be adaptable to different contexts and be suitable for everyone in the community.

Delegates from the Frontiers: Digital Futures symposium in July 2023

Other such challenges for the implementation of DPI were investigated through the three days of discussion, including the increasing concern around environmental harm from a rapidly digitising world, the considerations around diversity and inclusion, and the security and privacy concerns involved with bringing citizen services online. For example, one of the seed funding projects that emerged, based in Malawi, will investigate how communities that have low literacy and digital experience may be impacted by the rapidly growing mobile financial sector in Africa. Digital banking has increased access to the global economy and improved financial inclusion for women, however these new systems are vulnerable to fraud and exploitation. The project will explore training and education approaches to alleviate this threat to the positive progress of this area of DPI.

Designing sustainable DPI, and considering the potential environmental costs of technological solutions that require a lot of energy and produce significant amounts of waste, was a key theme of the symposium discussions. Engineering systems that help to monitor and improve the efficiency and management of energy usage and waste are crucial for addressing these concerns. However, sustainability goes further than protecting the environment. The participants also explored how to build and engineer solutions that are tailored to the needs and resources of local communities and that enable the digital infrastructure to have a longer lifespan. Convening a range of expertise, experiences and perspectives from across the world in one place, as the Frontiers programmes aim to do, provides a platform for such learnings to be shared between countries and contexts.

This cross-disciplinary approach at the centre of Frontiers symposia is especially important for topics with significant complexity, that require nuance and diversity to examine the risks, benefits, and agree a way forward. The opportunities and challenges posed by scaling up DPI in emerging economies must be considered from the perspective of businesses, local authorities, researchers, and development workers to ensure the most comprehensive analysis.

Interdisciplinary thinking usually comes as an afterthought, but with such a multi-faceted concept as DPI, it must be applied from the very beginning. The Frontiers symposia aim to tackle the siloed thinking that is rife even amongst organisations working towards the same goals of creating a better, more inclusive world. Early to mid-career researchers and practitioners have fresh, innovative, and highly valuable contributions to make to global development, and it was exciting to see so much collaboration at this year’s symposium between the brightest minds from more than 13 countries.

Since launching in 2016, the Frontiers programme has awarded grants that have financed 186 projects in 54 countries to help solve global challenges like the future of digital inclusivity. We want to continue sourcing and bringing together the most diverse and brightest minds to tackle them. If you’re able to support the programme through new partnerships and funding, please do get in touch.

The Frontiers symposium on Digital futures: Infrastructure for equity, inclusivity and sustainability was held in partnership with the International Institute for Information Technology – Bangalore (IIITB) in Bengaluru, India.