Beyond the hype: Digital Public Infrastructure for Africa, by Africa
Since India’s G20 Presidency elevated Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), it has dominated the agendas of multilateral agencies, development banks, and donors – particularly in Africa. Yet most of the thought leadership, technical framing, and implementation models are still being imported, not generated on the continent.
South Africa’s G20 Presidency challenged this dynamic. Building on Brazil’s focus on DPI for social and financial inclusion, and following India’s focus on DPI for development, South Africa placed equality, solidarity, and sustainability at the centre of the DPI agenda. The Presidency grounded this vision in African priorities: drawing from continental frameworks such as the African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy, common approaches to data governance and interoperable ID, and situating DPI within the African Continental Free Trade Area. It also brought questions of cross-border interoperability, shared digital markets, and the closing of regional infrastructure gaps into a G20 forum on African terms.
With its knowledge partners, the South African G20 Presidency advanced a public value rationale for DPI. The argument was not only that DPI can drive efficiency and productivity, but that it can and must deliver social outcomes – access, affordability, trust, accountability, resilience. That vision is clear. What is missing is the groundwork to make it real on a continental scale.
This is where the African Development Bank (AfDB) is now positioning itself. Digitalisation is a core pillar of the Bank’s mandate. The Bank’s Digital Transformation Action Plan treats digital not as a standalone sector, but as an enabler of social inclusion, service delivery, competitiveness, and growth across the economy. DPI sits at the centre of that shift.
The Bank has already committed to finance about USD 2.9 billion in ICT infrastructure, digital platforms, and digital economy enablers across its Regional Member Countries, and is now moving deliberately to increase the share of financing that is structured around DPI and DPI-like approaches across the full value chain – from connectivity and data infrastructure to ID, payments, digital public services, and the policy and institutional layers that sustain them.
But the Bank is not approaching DPI as something that can simply be replicated from another geography. As the continental development finance institution, the AfDB has a duty of care to its Regional Member Countries. That means it cannot finance DPI on the basis of generic blueprints or imported policy language. It has to build projects that are rooted in each country’s actual digital readiness, policy constraints, institutional arrangements, legacy systems, fiscal space, and capacity to operate and sustain these systems over time.
In practice, this requires evidence the continent largely does not yet have. Across Africa there are many promising building blocks – national ID systems, digital payment rails, eGovernment platforms, service delivery portals, data exchange layers – but the evidence on how these elements function together as DPI, and under what governance and financing models they remain inclusive, accountable, and sustainable, is still thin. There is not yet a sufficiently African evidence base to inform large scale, sovereign financed DPI operations at the speed and volume now being demanded.
What’s needed: A coherent, data-driven basis for an African vision of DPI that draws on continental frameworks, delivers transformative promise, increases visibility of African expertise, creates a common knowledge access point, and strengthens Africa’s collective voice in global DPI agendas.
How? Backed by Co-Develop, an intensive Africa DPI Initiative drawing on RIA’s Pan-African network of specialised researchers and practitioners, will provide AfDB with an evidence and analytical base to inform DPI investments on the continent.
The reframe: DPI is not a set of technologies but a social compact between states and citizens to drive public and local private value creation, requiring a rights-based enabling governance environment that ensures accessible infrastructure, a thriving tech ecosystem and the permeation across various African industries and sectors
By building robust evidence, analytical frameworks, and collaborative networks, anchored in African organisations, the study will equip African institutions and partners to invest in DPI that works for Africa, by Africa.
These frameworks will strengthen AfDB’s ability to direct DPI funding toward projects aligned with African priorities, and institutional realities, within a globalised digital ecosystem that holds unprecedented regional potential.
Four objectives for transformative DPI
The study will equip the AfDB with tools to enhance the design and evaluation DPI investments across Africa, directly informing the Bank’s operations and future digital transformation projects. Specifically, this will:
1. Map the African DPI Landscape: Create a comprehensive repository of DPI systems and stakeholders—governments, fintechs, civic tech, system integrators—assessing their reach, maturity, and impact.
2. Analyse the Geopolitics and Political Economy of DPI: Apply geopolitical and political economy analysis to guide targeted, evidence-based investments that deliver sustainable public and social value. Identify what works, what doesn’t, and why. Maximise positive multipliers while mitigating risks and dependency traps.
3. Prepare the Ground for Pan-African and National DPI Frameworks: Drawing on continental instruments—the African Continental Free Trade Area, AU Digital Transformation Strategy—collaborate with regional institutions to develop a DPI Fiscal and Governance Implementation Roadmap. Align digital transformation with fiscal realities, governance capacities, and pathways for public and local private value creation.
4. Build an African Community of Practice: The African develop Bank will host a community of practice. With the support of RIA’s 20-year Pan-African policy and regulatory network, this CoP will connect researchers, regulators, civil society, and innovators to generate empirical evidence, share knowledge, and elevate African perspectives in regional and global DPI debates.
