Digital public infrastructure is high priority for governments worldwide

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) describes the foundational digital capabilities nations provide to facilitate efficient and secure interactions within society, such as proving identity, paying for goods and services, proving an entitlement, or sharing data. DPI is a country’s digital backbone, rapidly enabling modern and responsive government, increasing inclusion and economic participation, and stimulating innovation across all sectors.

Consider a government agency that urgently needs to launch a new digital service. Rather than the weeks or months it would typically take them to build a new service from scratch, they use centrally provided capabilities for verifying identity, collecting form data, sending notifications, making payments, and issuing certificates—and are able to assemble the new service in a matter of days. With such reductions in delivery timeframes, DPI also makes experimentation quicker, cheaper, and easier, leading to increased innovation in the public sector.

The private sector also directly benefits from a nation’s DPI. Companies can easily assure their customers’ identities, removing the need for onerous and expensive verification processes. Real-time payments can be incorporated into physical and online commerce stores with minimal investment. Employers can easily verify candidate certifications and qualifications. Entirely new opportunities can emerge—built on the underlying DPI, as PayTM has done in India, building on the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to develop the largest digital payments, commerce, and financial services platform in India, used by more than 300 million people.

Publicly accessible digital twins, such as those produced by Helsinki, Singapore, and Boston, are another innovative type of DPI, providing a shared virtual environment that enables collaboration, data-driven decision-making, and public engagement for the development of urban infrastructure and services. Similarly, open source large language models (LLMs) like SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages In One Network) provide a valuable public resource, extending the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and generate language for underrepresented populations and low-resource languages across Southeast Asia.

The social and economic case for DPI is compelling

The savings an established collection of DPI can bring to a country are substantial, with India estimating that it saves more than $31.8 billion a year through its DPI initiatives, the equivalent of nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP). At a more granular level, individual DPI capabilities also unlock impressive savings. Estonia’s X-Road data exchange platform saves its citizens an estimated 2,066 years of working time annually and savings of approximately 2 percent of GDP. GOV.UK Notify, the UK government’s notifications platform, delivers tens of millions a year in cashable savings. A robust digital identity framework can ensure economic stability. A recent Harvard Business Review article cited that a country’s digital identity programs alone “can unlock economic value equivalent to 3–13% of GDP, with an average 6% improvement for emerging countries.”

If every nation adopted DPI and realized estimated savings of 1 percent of GDP, the collective savings generated worldwide would surpass $1.1 trillion annually.

In addition to the significant savings in time and money, the adoption of DPI brings benefits for governments including acceleration of digital modernization, more consistent public service delivery, increased digital inclusion and participation, reductions in leakage and fraud, and increased agility and responsiveness in the face of change and crises.

A case in point, of 166 governments that launched cash-transfer programs through the COVID-19 pandemic, those with some stage of DPI reached an average of 51 percent, while those without reached only 16 percent of their populations. In 2022, during an economic crisis in Sri Lanka, the government was able to take advantage of its population register to deliver the National Fuel Pass, a nation-scale rationing system to successfully manage the severe fuel shortages in the country, in less than 4 weeks. Launched in 2019, Ukraine’s Diia smartphone app has been crucial in enhancing the nation’s resilience since the 2022 Russian invasion, often providing the sole means for Ukrainians to access government aid and services.

Reuse, don’t re-create

While the benefits of DPI are significant, the research and development of new DPI can take years and cost hundreds of thousands and up to millions of dollars per capability. This pace of delivery and scale of investment can be challenging or impossible for many nations to make. However, because the foundational digital capabilities that DPI provide aren’t unique to one country or jurisdiction, when one country creates DPI and publishes it under an open license, many others can reuse and adapt the solution, at a fraction of the cost of creating their own. When the Digital Transformation Agency in Australia reused the open source GOV.UK Notify code base to develop their federal government notification platform, they were able to implement it within two months at a cost of just $97,000, a stark contrast to the millions invested by the UK to design, develop, and enhance the platform.

For more examples, refer to Open Government Solutions to access a collection of freely available, proven, open source DPI systems developed by governments and nonprofits around the world.

AWS is instrumental in enabling robust, scalable, and cost-effective DPI

Because DPI can be used by all of society, innovative use cases you hadn’t envisioned can emerge, leading to much higher levels of demand than anticipated. Benefiting from elastic and resilient AWS architecture, DPI can scale to support ever-increasing and unpredictable demand in a cost-effective way, while maintaining high security and reliability standards. These capabilities, along with the industry-leading threat intelligence program AWS provides, are crucial for ensuring seamless operation of essential digital services, protecting against increasing cyber threats, and providing society with DPI it can rely on.

Let’s talk

If you’d like to learn more, hear how other governments are harnessing DPI, or discuss ways AWS can support you to get started, contact our specialist DPI team at digitalpublicinfrastructure@amazon.com.