From Solar Trading in India to Safeguards in South Africa: DPI in Practice

This year’s second consecutive Global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Summit in Cape Town, South Africa centred on a key question: What does DPI look like in practice? Following three agenda-packed days with engaging discussions among 1300+ diverse stakeholders from around the world, the most prominent takeaway was that DPI in practice is fundamentally about strong ecosystems.  

Beyond abstract stakeholder maps and theoretically-sound consultation frameworks, the Summit was a reminder that strong DPI ecosystems in practice are about entrepreneurs building businesses on open digital rails; civil society organizations holding government accountable for inclusive design; and governments actively inviting collaboration towards ensuring these systems get built with safety and inclusivity at their core.  Two moments from the Summit captured this dynamic: one was from a climate panel showcasing entrepreneurial innovation, and the other from South Africa’s inspiring safeguards engagement with civil society. These examples show how different actors can engage with DPI from complementary yet different positions — building value by leveraging open infrastructure or shaping the infrastructure to ensure it serves everyone.

Building on open digital rails: The innovation dividend

During the Summit, a panel on DPI for climate offered practical insights of what happens when DPI is genuinely open and interoperable. Government stakeholders described their work building open protocols and platforms for managing climate, biodiversity and human–wildlife conflict. Then entrepreneurs took to the stage, including the five winners of the DPI for People and Planet Challenge. They had been selected from hundreds of applicants for the opportunity to pitch at the Summit and receive up to $100,000 in funding. 

What stood out wasn’t just the quality of the solutions, but how naturally these entrepreneurs wove DPI into their business models — not as an abstraction but as the foundational infrastructure of their companies. With just five minutes to pitch, they demonstrated a fundamental tenet: when the underlying digital rails are open, entrepreneurs can focus on solving problems rather than rebuilding the foundations every time. 

• Abiental, a Brazilian platform, described how they enable georeferenced environmental data collection — tracking species, reporting illegal deforestation and mining — by integrating with Brazil’s Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), the national climate DPI. Their solution even works offline thanks to satellite, and turns field observations into verified, traceable environmental data that can support future carbon credit systems. The DPI connection means their platform does not run in isolation but plugs into existing government infrastructure for land and environmental management.

• Kazam, an Indian energy startup, showcased their peer-to-peer energy trading platform built on India’s Unified Energy Interface and the Beckn Protocol — open digital protocols that enable households with rooftop solar to sell excess electricity to others (often gig economy workers on e-scooters). Rather than building their own closed marketplace, Kazam leverages India’s energy DPI to create a dynamic local energy market where prosumers can trade power at mutually agreed prices, all tracked transparently through smart meters and blockchain.

These are live businesses solving real problems, made possible because the underlying infrastructure is open, interoperable and accessible. When government builds infrastructure as genuinely public — not fenced behind proprietary gates or vendor lock-in — it unlocks an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who can build on top. 

Shaping the foundation: The governance dividend 

But openness and interoperability alone do not guarantee inclusive outcomes. The second dimension of the DPI ecosystem came into sharp focus through South Africa’s demonstration of what it means to embed safeguards into digital transformation from the outset.

In the lead-up to the Summit, a DPI Safeguards workshop was co-convened by the DPI Safeguards initiative and human rights organization, Black Sash. The workshop brought together 25 civil society organizations alongside the Presidency’s Digital Service Unit (DSU) to discuss the Roadmap for the Digital Transformation of Government, implemented through the national DPI initiative known as MyMzansi. The participating CSOs represented expertise across social protection, digital rights, legal advocacy and technology ethics – the voices that need to be at the table when building infrastructure that will affect millions of people. 

The outcome was a shared intention among CSOs to shift from ad-hoc engagement to more structured, continuous dialogue. The DSU acknowledged that engagement with civil society plays a role in service design decisions that help prevent ‘paper issues’ from being carried into digital design.   

CSOs shared evidence-based concerns about the ways digital systems for social grant verification were contributing to exclusion. They highlighted issues such as legitimate inter-household transfers being flagged as fraud and barriers affecting unemployed women and people with disabilities. These concerns reflected challenges observed in deployed systems, rather than hypothetical risks.   

The DSU’s response was constructive – they welcomed the detailed feedback and indicated openness to continuing the engagement. CSOs are now beginning to organise into a collective body to present unified recommendations to the Presidency, with Black Sash facilitating the process. The shared goal is to move toward a structured engagement mechanism, one that supports ongoing dialogue, transparency, and accountability throughout the MyMzansi rollout, as opposed to one-off consultation.  

This is what DPI safeguards in practice look like: genuine power-sharing, less-than-comfortable conversations welcomed rather than avoided, and institutional mechanisms that make civil society engagement structural rather than optional.  

The ecosystem approach is working 

These two dimensions – entrepreneurs building on top of digital public infrastructure, civil society shaping the foundation – represent complementary but contrasting forms of engagement with DPI development and use.  

This speaks to both what DPI is as an approach and how it is practised. Technical principles such as interoperability, openness and modularity matter because they enable the ecosystem. Governance principles such as inclusion, accountability and meaningful participation matter because they ensure the ecosystem serves public purpose rather than narrow interests. 

The convening of the DPI ecosystem in Cape Town – 100 different nationalities, 1300+ people from government, private sector, civil society, open-source solutions, development organizations and academia – demonstrated that the ecosystem approach is not theoretical. Governments are building open infrastructure. Entrepreneurs are innovating on top of it. Civil society is actively engaging to shape it.  

The question for countries now is not what DPI is and whether to build it, but whether DPI will be build in ways that enable both innovation, inclusion and safety, or risk creating technically sophisticated systems that do not serve everyone, everywhere. In case you missed this year’s Summit, you can still get a glimpse of what took place here. Want to know about our work on DPI and safeguards at UNDP? Email us here digital@undp.org