Why Digital Public Goods Matter?

Why digital public goods matter

When implementing digital solutions, digital public goods should be considered and prioritised. Digital public goods provide benefits to countries, institutions, and businesses trying to advance and achieve the SDGs. Below are some of the leading benefits of digital public goods:

Adoptability:

DPGs can be freely adopted by governments or agencies.

Avoid Vendor Lock-in:

Because DPGs are open source, they do not lock the user into one technology vendor, thus ensuring compatibility.

Scalability:

Adopting DPGs that have been successfully implemented at scale elsewhere can save countries and institutions resources and enable lower risk experimentation, piloting, and roll-out.

Adaptability:

DPGs can be adapted to fit local needs which can also help build long-term ownership and agency of implementing countries.

Collaboration:

Any users of a particular DPG can collaborate and share best practices, as is the case in most communities of practice.

Project sustainability:

Adaptations and iterations in countries can be supported by open-source communities. New features and best-practices developed by implementing countries can be merged into the generic DPG.

Country ownership and capacity:

DPGs can enable deep involvement of local expertise in country-specific implementations and can be deployed together with dedicated efforts to build long-term local capacity to maintain and iterate these implementations for future needs.

Transparency and accountability:

The open-source licensing of DPGs means that their code base can be independently scrutinised and audited. This also facilitates accountability and public discourse around issues such as incorporating best practices and designing DPGs with the aim of doing no harm.