Understanding Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs)

One Level Deep

#4 in a series of 29 on Africa’s EdTech Breakthrough System & Project.

Executive Summary

Africa has a proven record of designing and scaling digital public infrastructure under conditions of low connectivity, institutional fragmentation, and constrained resources. From mobile money and health information systems to modern digital identity platforms, African governments and practitioners have demonstrated sustained capability at the infrastructure layer.

This experience has produced a distinctive DPI governance logic: sovereignty-preserving, implementation-plural, ecosystem-oriented, and incrementally adoptable. Africa’s engagement with MOSIP and GovStack reflects this maturity, with African actors participating as co-creators who test, adapt, and shape generalized DPI building blocks for real-world use.

Africa’s DPI-Ed extends these lessons to education, addressing challenges unique to the sector—linguistic diversity, curricular sovereignty, and long impact cycles—by integrating infrastructure with ecosystem economics, delivery capacity, and long-term stewardship. In doing so, Africa’s EdTech Breakthrough, the resulting Breakthrough System, and the proposed Breakthrough Project position the continent not only as an adopter of global DPI practice, but as a reference for how DPIs can be governed, financed, and sustained at scale in diverse, resource-constrained environments.

1. Africa’s History of Infrastructure Innovation

Over the past two decades, African governments and practitioners have repeatedly built digital public infrastructure under real-world constraints—low connectivity, fragmented institutions, high informality, and limited fiscal space—while still achieving national and, in some cases, cross-border scale.

Illustrative examples include:

• Mobile money systems (such as M-Pesa) that reached widespread adoption ahead of formal digital identity systems or broad banking penetration.
• Health information systems (notably DHIS2 deployments) that evolved into de facto national data backbones across dozens of countries.
• National identity modernization efforts increasingly aligned around interoperable, standards-based architectures.

Together, these experiences demonstrate a sustained African capability to innovate at the infrastructure layer. Africa’s application of this capability to education—Africa’s DPI-Ed—extends this pattern deliberately into the education sector.

2. DPI Governance: Africa’s Distinctive Contribution

Africa’s experience with DPIs has been accompanied by the emergence of governance models shaped by institutional and political reality.

Across sectors, African DPIs have converged on a shared governance logic:

• Sovereignty-preserving: national authority over data, policy, and outcomes is retained.
• Implementation-plural: shared standards coexist with multiple conforming implementations.
• Ecosystem-oriented: governments enable markets.
• Incremental: systems are adopted progressively, minimizing replacement risk.

This governance logic is visible in the federated management of health information systems, coordination through Regional Economic Communities, and African Union–level policy frameworks that guide national implementation choices. It provides the institutional foundation on which Africa’s DPI-Ed is constructed.

3. Africa and MOSIP: From Adoption to Co-Creation

Africa’s engagement with the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) provides a concrete illustration of this governance maturity in practice.

MOSIP originated as a generalization of India’s Aadhaar experience into a country-agnostic, open-source DPI building block. African countries were among its earliest and most serious adopters, engaging as users and as:

• contributors to functional requirements,
• testers in challenging operational environments, and
• participants in governance discussions on inclusion, data protection, and rollout sequencing.

Several African governments have used MOSIP to modernize legacy identity systems while adapting it to local legal, institutional, and political conditions.

This experience is relevant for DPI-Ed in two ways. First, it demonstrates Africa’s capacity to absorb and operationalize generalized DPI building blocks. Second, it shows how African practitioners increasingly participate as co-creators within global DPI ecosystems—an institutional posture that informs Africa’s engagement with multi-country DPI initiatives in education.

4. Africa’s Role in GovStack

Africa also serves as a primary proving ground for GovStack, a global initiative focused on specifying interoperable DPI building blocks across sectors.

GovStack’s approach—specifying the interfaces to modular, mix-and-match building blocks that can be implemented by different actors—aligns closely with African implementation realities.

African governments, AU-linked institutions, and practitioners have engaged with GovStack to:

• test building-block viability in low-resource environments,
• surface governance and sequencing challenges early, and
• ensure specifications accommodate diverse legal and institutional contexts.

In education, GovStack’s DPI-Ed building blocks reflect lessons drawn from multiple jurisdictions. Africa’s DPI-Ed effort, in turn, provides one of the most demanding real-world contexts in which those specifications must function. The relationship is bidirectional: Africa acts both as a beneficiary of global DPI specifications and as a contributor to their evolution.

5. From DPI Adoption to DPI Leadership

Taken together, Africa’s experience across sectors suggests a clear trajectory:

• from isolated systems to shared infrastructure,
• from vendor-locked solutions to open building blocks, and
• from project funding to sustainability by design.

Africa’s DPI-Ed represents a generalization of these lessons, informed by global practice and embedded in African institutional reality. If successful, it positions Africa as a reference continent for how DPIs can be governed, financed, and sustained in plural, resource-constrained environments.

This broader implication—how Africa’s EdTech Breakthrough System extends beyond education to shape future DPI practice—is the foundation of Africa’s emerging leadership role in global digital public infrastructure.

The next essay in this series is 05. Understanding AUDA-NEPAD’s EdTech Policy Framework.