The technology choices that countries make today will impact the course of their digitization effort for several decades. To drive toward a fairer future, countries need to have greater agency over how to leverage key technologies in improving development outcomes for their citizens in the years to come.

Early indications suggest that many countries will be making key design decisions as they move to set up DPI over the next five years. Co-Develop’s role is to enable countries to leverage shared digital infrastructure thinking that is inclusive, safe, and equitable. Since countries have expressed a keen desire to improve development outcomes, we will work with numerous stakeholders to accelerate countries’ capabilities and help them consider tradeoffs as they implement these transformational systems.

Co-Develop looks for the following signals when making investments:

Country demand

Co-Develop supports efforts where there is clear country demand for DPI. A good indicator of demand is a government’s willingness to invest significant resources to advance their DPI work. In such cases, Co-Develop considers making grants to organizations that can help the country accelerate a DPI project.

Country readiness

While several countries are keen to set up DPI, some have a head start by assembling policy and design frameworks, interagency implementation teams, and dedicated funding streams. Such countries can leverage the support offered by Co-Develop’s partners more effectively.

Use-case led, DPI-focused

We look for countries that articulate demand in terms of use cases, not technology. Projects need a clear, tangible public benefit that will drive adoption and make the transformative impact of replicable infrastructure clear to all stakeholders.

Effective Governance

When implementing DPI, technology is the easier part. More challenging – but critical to success – is ensuring that DPI is trusted by the people and governed well. Co-Develop assesses each grant from the perspective of inclusion, safety, and equity, and evaluates how countries plan to engage all groups in the implementation process. We also support the creation and sharing of guidance and policy recommendations that improve access, inclusion, and equity.

Bias for speed at scale

Supporting efforts to tackle population-scale challenges at scale is a priority. Pilots in which the country’s path to scaling is not immediately obvious are less of a priority. Co-Develop is especially interested in initiatives that have a pathway for adoption in multiple countries.

Technologies that avoid vendor lock-in

Countries are keenly aware of the pains of using technologies that lock them into a specific vendor, or cede control of their citizens’ data to foreign entities. To enable greater market competition, local sovereignty, and innovation, Co-Develop looks to support open technology opportunities. These technologies offer countries the ability to leverage proven solutions that have already succeeded elsewhere rather than starting from scratch. They also allow countries flexibility to work with a variety of vendors.

We make investments in organizations working across four broad categories:

• Technical Assistance Providers – Organizations that engage with governments on design choices, policy considerations, with a focus on inclusion and safeguards.

• Proven Digital Public Goods – Organizations that build and maintain reusable open-source code bases that can help build DPI and have already been deployed at population scale in other geographies.

• Enable Local and Ecosystem-wide Capacity – Initiatives that help governments, civil society, and system integrators/ vendors develop technical, policy, and implementation capabilities as they design and deploy DPI.

• Research and Policy Institutions – Organizations that measure and research DPI’s impact and harms and disseminate good practices on questions of governance, financing, inclusion, and more.

Co-Develop provides flexible “upstream” funding to help unlock bottlenecks to designing, financing, and implementing inclusive and safe digitisation, leveraging shared digital infrastructure. Our process typically includes the following:

• Source – Co-Develop engages with development institutions, civil society, digital public goods, researchers, and other ecosystem stakeholders to identify potential opportunities for funding that align with our guiding principles.

• Co-Develop – Investment opportunities are co-developed, meaning we co-curate the opportunity. Often the solution isn’t obvious and requires a collaborative, rapid iteration cycle. During this process, we conduct due diligence on each other.

• Invest – We jointly align on the final investment opportunity and present it to an Investment Committee. We do not request proposals.

• Execute – We collaborate regularly with our investment partners. We are light on formal reporting and heavy on ideation, iteration, and collaboration to achieve our mutual objectives.

Our Approach: Making Investments to Combat DPI Bottlenecks

Co-Develop will mobilize financial and other resources, make grants, and disseminate best practices in order to address the bottlenecks described above. Our core activities are the following:

Pool capital (philanthropic and bilateral) to focus resources and expertise

Co-Develop pools capital from numerous actors to reduce donor funding fragmentation and enable deeper and broader investments that can support the development of inclusive digital solutions that take an infrastructure approach. An early example includes our support for G2P Connect. In addition, wherever possible we work with other funders to draw additional capital in this space.

Capitalize on Political Windows

As a small and nimble entity, Co-Develop can move quickly during periods of political and institutional alignment. This speed allows us to work within political cycles to create successes that can catalyze additional external investment or domestic funding models.

Make investments to support the scaling of proven solutions that take the infrastructure approach

Co-Develop’s grants are our most powerful tool to enable adoption of digital solutions in countries, which take an infrastructure approach. Our support is intended to address the challenges described above. Specifically, we will make investments in four areas :

• Support and harmonize technical assistance for deployment of digital solutions to help governments implement cross-cutting systems with a clear focus on inclusion, safeguards, and equity.

• Invest in proven solutions that leverage the infrastructure approach to increase the availability of such ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions.

• Enable local and ecosystem-wide capacity to help governments, civil society, and vendors develop technical, policy, and implementation capabilities as they deploy digital solutions.

• Support research and policy efforts to diffuse policies, consultative approaches, and governance models that support safe, equitable, and inclusive digitisation.

To maximize our impact over the short term, Co-Develop will focus on: proven Solutions with an infrastructure approach that are ready to scale, countries that articulate a clear demand for population scale solutions, and implementations that are use-case driven, have appropriate governance, and deploy at societal scale. For more information on our investment approach, see here.