The Best-Kept Secret in Global Development: (And Why Consultants Hope You Never Find Out)

The Plumbing Nobody Talks About

Most people have never heard of digital public goods. And frankly, why would they? It’s not exactly the kind of phrase that gets you invited onto breakfast TV or trending on LinkedIn with some motivational quote overlaid on a sunset.

But here’s my conviction: digital public goods (DPGs) and their close cousin digital public infrastructure (DPI) are quietly becoming one of the most important shifts in how governments actually deliver services. Not the PowerPoint version of digital transformation that consultancies sell for eye-watering fees. The real thing.

They’re not shiny AI toys that make headlines. They’re not apps chasing unicorn valuations. They’re more like plumbing – invisible, vital, and taken completely for granted until it stops working. And to me, they’re one of the best-kept secrets in development today.

Which is odd, because we’re talking about billions of pounds in potential savings, millions of lives improved, and a fundamental reimagining of how public services work in the digital age.

So why the silence? Perhaps because there’s no Lamborghini to lean against in the promotional video. Or perhaps because acknowledging this movement exists means admitting that most governments have been spectacularly wasting money for years.

What Actually Are Digital Public Goods?

Let’s start simple, because the jargon in this space can make your eyes glaze over faster than a council budget meeting.

Digital public goods are open digital building blocks: software, data, standards, even AI models that are freely available, safe to use, and can be reused by any country or organisation. They’re not owned by one vendor. They’re not designed to lock you into expensive multi-year contracts. They’re built for impact, not quarterly earnings.

Think of them as LEGO pieces for governments. You don’t need to manufacture your own bricks from scratch (expensive, time-consuming, probably won’t work). You just pick up the blocks that already exist, connect them, adapt them to your needs, and – crucially – anyone else can do the same.

Some examples that are already working at scale:

DHIS2: An open-source health information platform now used in 80+ countries, tracking everything from disease outbreaks to routine immunizations. During COVID-19, it quietly became the most widely deployed tool for health data in low- and middle-income countries. Not because of massive marketing budgets, but because it worked and was free to use.

Mojaloop: A payments platform that allows banks and mobile money providers to actually talk to each other. Revolutionary concept, apparently. In Tanzania, it means your phone network no longer dictates who you can send money to. In Uganda, it’s connecting previously isolated financial systems. The technical term for this is “interoperability” – the human term is “not being ripped off by monopolies.”

OpenCRVS: A civil registration system that helps governments record births and deaths reliably, securely, and cheaply. We’ll come back to this one, because it’s where I got properly pulled into this world.

What makes these fundamentally different from the commercial tech products governments typically buy is that they’re open. The code is public. The standards are shared. They’re not proprietary black boxes that require expensive consultants to interpret. They’re designed to be adapted, improved, and shared globally.

It’s a radically different model from the “buy expensive software, get locked into expensive support contracts, pay for expensive upgrades forever” approach that’s dominated government IT for decades.

Digital Public Infrastructure: Building the City With Those Blocks

If DPGs are the LEGO blocks, then digital public infrastructure (DPI) is the city you build out of them.

DPI refers to the foundational digital “rails” that allow societies to actually function at scale in the 21st century. Think of it as the digital equivalent of roads, electricity grids, or water systems – the infrastructure everyone needs but nobody thinks about until it breaks.

Typically, DPI rests on three core pillars:

1. Digital Identity – So you can prove who you are without carrying around seventeen different pieces of paper that half the agencies won’t accept anyway.
2. Digital Payments – So money can move instantly and cheaply, rather than through the Byzantine systems that currently exist primarily to generate fees.
3. Data Exchange – So government systems can actually talk to each other securely, without asking you to fill in the same bloody form six times because the departments refuse to share information.

We’ve already seen the power of these pillars working at scale, and the numbers are staggering:

India’s UPI (Unified Payments Interface) processed more than 20 billion transactions in a single month in 2025. Twenty billion. That’s not a typo. It’s gone from zero in 2016 to handling over 80% of India’s digital payment volumes, all at essentially zero fees to users.

Brazil’s Pix, launched by the central bank in 2020, became the country’s most popular way to pay within months. By 2023, over two-thirds of adult Brazilians were using it for everyday transactions. Again, instant, cheap, and built on public infrastructure rather than private monopoly.

Estonia’s X-Road enables over 3,000 government services to interconnect seamlessly. Estonian citizens can do virtually everything online because their government systems actually talk to each other. Radical, I know.

The takeaway? When the plumbing is properly installed, all sorts of higher-level services – from welfare payments to vaccination certificates to business registrations – become faster, cheaper, and genuinely inclusive rather than just claiming to be in the strategy documents.

Why Now? (Or: How COVID Made This Impossible to Ignore)

The push for DPGs and DPI really kicked off in 2019, when the UN recommended advancing digital public goods as part of its Digital Cooperation Roadmap. A year later, the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) was formed by Norway, Sierra Leone, UNICEF, and an Indian think tank – an unlikely coalition that signaled this wasn’t just another rich-country initiative.

Then COVID hit, and suddenly digital infrastructure became the difference between countries that could roll out emergency aid in days versus those that stumbled through bureaucracy for months while people went hungry.

Togo launched its Novissi cash transfer program in just 10 days, reaching 25% of its adult population via mobile money. Ten days. Compare that with countries where relief payments took months to arrive, if they arrived at all, because nobody had digital systems in place to identify beneficiaries or deliver funds electronically.

India transferred cash relief to 200 million women instantly during lockdowns. Countries without digital ID and payment infrastructure struggled to reach 16% of their populations with similar programs.

The contrast was brutal and impossible to ignore.

By 2022, donors committed $295 million specifically for DPI development. By 2023, the G20 formally recognized DPI in its leaders’ declaration – the first time digital public infrastructure appeared in that kind of high-level diplomatic text. By 2025, 26 countries had signed up to the 50-in-5 campaign, a collective effort to help at least 50 countries build core DPI systems within five years.

What was a niche conversation among technologists and UN officials has become mainstream development policy. Finally.

My Journey Into This World: OpenCRVS and the Billion Invisible People

For me, this isn’t abstract theory or development sector buzzwords. My own journey into digital public goods runs directly through OpenCRVS, and it’s rooted in seeing firsthand what happens when registration systems fail.

I first came across OpenCRVS years ago while working in Bangladesh. Back then, it was still being incubated out of Plan International – not yet a standalone nonprofit, not yet officially designated as a digital public good. Just a promising pilot in a few districts, trying to solve a problem that nobody in rich countries even thinks about: how do you reliably register births and deaths when your systems are paper-based, disconnected, and chronically underfunded?

The concept was deceptively simple: digitize civil registration, make it faster and cheaper, connect it with health clinics and national databases so the data flows automatically rather than requiring multiple trips to government offices. Even then, I could see the potential.

I’d also seen, across both Bangladesh and Pakistan, the devastating consequences when these systems don’t work.

Families whose children weren’t registered at birth. That one missing administrative step cascades through an entire life: no official identity, no passport, no healthcare enrollment, no school registration, no ability to vote, no access to formal financial services. You’re essentially invisible to the state.

Globally, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people – possibly over a billion – without legal identity because of these gaps in registration systems. Not because they don’t exist, but because the bureaucratic infrastructure to acknowledge their existence is broken, expensive, or inaccessible.

Fast forward five or six years. I reconnected with the OpenCRVS team, and what struck me was how much had changed. The product had matured from promising pilot to production-ready platform. Countries were no longer just testing it – they were actually deploying it at national scale.

Uganda had run pilots. Madagascar had implemented it. The Kingdom of Tonga has recently implemented it. And crucially, governments were moving away from clunky proprietary systems that cost millions and took years to customize, instead adopting an open-source platform that was flexible, cost-effective, and globally supported.

OpenCRVS spun out from Plan International into its own nonprofit and was officially designated a digital public good – meeting the standards for openness, privacy, and impact.

For me, that was the clincher. I’ve always believed in the power of open source, but this wasn’t just philosophical preference or tech ideology. This was about impact I’d witnessed personally. I’d seen the friction in registration systems. I’d seen the human cost of exclusion. And now here was a tool that could change that at population scale.

That’s what pulled me properly into this space. Not the technology for its own sake, but what it could actually do for people who’d been failed by expensive, closed systems for decades.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Government IT Spending

Here’s where we need to talk about the elephant in the procurement office.

Governments globally spend billions – possibly hundreds of billions – on IT systems every year. Much of that money goes to large consulting firms and proprietary software vendors who’ve built very comfortable businesses around complexity, vendor lock-in, and multi-year support contracts.

The pitch is always some variation of: “This is enterprise-grade, secure, customized for your needs, and comes with white-glove support.” The reality is often: “This will take three years longer than promised, cost twice the original budget, require expensive consultants to maintain, and lock you into our ecosystem indefinitely.”

I’ve sat in enough boardrooms to know the pattern. A government decides it needs to modernize some system – health records, payment processing, identity management, whatever. Tenders go out. Big firms submit proposals with impressive credentials and reassuring price tags (initially). The contract gets signed.

Then begins the slow, expensive grind of customization, integration, testing, more customization, unexpected costs, timeline extensions, and eventually a system that sort of works but is completely dependent on the vendor for any changes.

Digital public goods fundamentally threaten this model. And that’s precisely why they matter.

When governments can adopt proven, open-source solutions that are already working in other countries – solutions they can customize themselves, that don’t lock them into vendor dependency, that cost a fraction of traditional procurement – the entire consulting-industrial complex gets nervous.

This isn’t about technology being “free” (it’s not – implementation, customization, and support still cost money). It’s about breaking the cycle of dependency and wasted spending on proprietary systems that solve the same problems repeatedly.

India’s digital ID and payments infrastructure likely saved the government over $10 billion by eliminating fraud and middlemen in welfare programs. Brazil’s Pix cost a fraction of what a proprietary payment system would have cost and delivered better results. Estonia built X-Road for less than many governments spend on a single failed IT project.

The savings aren’t just financial – they’re about speed, flexibility, and actually serving citizens rather than feeding vendors.

Why This Matters (Beyond Saving Money)

Strip away the jargon and the policy documents, and the promise of DPGs and DPI comes down to a few fundamental shifts:

Inclusion: People who were invisible in government systems suddenly exist, with rights and access to services. A birth certificate isn’t just paperwork – it’s proof of existence in the eyes of the state.

Speed: Emergency aid can be delivered in days, not months. Social programs can scale rapidly. Government services can actually be responsive rather than bureaucratically glacial.

Savings: When you’re not paying licensing fees, avoiding vendor lock-in, and eliminating fraud through better systems, billions in public money stay public. India’s numbers speak for themselves.

Innovation: Open rails like UPI and Pix haven’t killed private fintech – they’ve unleashed it. When the infrastructure is public and interoperable, anyone can build services on top. Competition flourishes. Users benefit.

Cooperation: One country’s solution can be adapted by another. Sierra Leone’s OpenG2P for cash transfers. Bangladesh’s implementation of OpenCRVS. Ethiopia and Morocco adopting MOSIP for digital ID. The same problems don’t need to be solved repeatedly at vast expense.

And yet, outside specialist circles in development and GovTech, hardly anyone knows this is happening.

The Best-Kept Secret

To me, digital public goods remain one of the best-kept secrets in global development. It’s still a relatively young movement, but it’s already fundamentally changing how forward-thinking governments work.

The truth is, we need more people – policymakers, donors, technologists, system integrators, even curious citizens – to pay attention. Not because this is the next flashy trend or Silicon Valley disruption narrative, but because it’s about something more fundamental.

It’s about treating digital infrastructure the way we treat roads or electricity: as something everyone should have access to, something open and shared, something foundational rather than proprietary.

It’s about governments reclaiming agency over their digital future rather than outsourcing it to vendors who profit from complexity and dependency.

And it’s about recognizing that the most powerful innovations in public services over the next decade won’t come from startups or big tech platforms, but from open, collaborative, public infrastructure that works for everyone.

What’s Next in This Series

In the next part of this series, I’ll share real-world stories from South Asia, Africa, and Latin America – places where these “digital LEGO blocks” are already being put to work at scale.

From the Bangladesh pilot boosting birth registration rates by 49% with OpenCRVS, to Togo rolling out cash to informal workers in 10 days, to Brazil’s instant payment rail becoming a national habit processing billions of transactions monthly – we’ll look at how countries are actually building with these open digital rails and what it means for people’s lives.

Because it’s one thing to talk about digital plumbing in theory. It’s another to see how it changes life for a farmer accessing credit for the first time, a street vendor receiving government aid directly to her phone, or a mother registering her child’s birth in minutes rather than making three trips to distant government offices.

The case studies are where this gets real. And some of them will surprise you.