Building on the Capabilities in the Philippines
The Philippines, with its deep pool of technical talent, forward thinking leadership in government and a vibrant start-up led innovation ecosystem, is well positioned to leverage these capabilities to deepen the digital transformation journey. As a leader in thinking about how shared public infrastructure can be leveraged for inclusion, the Philippines is well position to emerge as a regional and global leader. Strengthening the local ecosystem can ensure sustained quality, context-appropriateness, and ability to take ownership, ultimately building on the DPI approach to achieve population-scale impact.
The Philippines and Digital Public Infrastructure
As countries accelerate their digital transformation efforts, the Philippines stands out in their embrace of the “digital public infrastructure" (DPI) approach - an approach that leverages society-wide, shared digital capabilities to enable widespread participation in society and markets. Specifically, several government departments are actively leveraging Digital Public Goods (DPGs) and other open technologies for various DPI projects spanning social benefits transfers, instant payments and e-civil registration systems among others. Combined with a wealth of leverageable technical capacity across its many institutions, the Philippines shows incredible potential to emerge as a global leader in sustained digital transformation.
About The Business Insights Laboratory for Development (BUILD)
The Business Insights Laboratory for Development (BUILD) aims to leverage academic expertise to create management solutions that bolster the economic competitiveness of Filipino companies, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs). BUILD specializes in operations research, data analytics, financial modeling, generative artificial intelligence, and data platform services. Even before its official establishment, BUILD has actively collaborated with industry partners, engaging faculty and students in various generative AI projects. These efforts are complemented by research addressing real-world challenges and providing solutions catering to educational and industrial sectors.
BUILD is managed by Ateneo's John Gokongwei School of Management through its Department of Quantitative Methods and Information Technology.
The Technical Resource Lab
Technical Resource Labs (TRLs) offer the environment to realise this opportunity. As a go-to source of innovation and talent for DPI projects across the country, a TRL that engages closely with government and leverages private sector capabilities can augment the technical capacity of several different agencies to swiftly and effectively improve well being at population scale.
Technical Resource Lab (TRL) Activities
A TRL is equipped with:
Infrastructure and hardware to enable stakeholders to engage with DPGs in a risk-free environment;
A small technical team who are trained to work across multiple DPGs and to help government build solutions using a DPI approach; and
The competencies to train the broader market — system integrators (SIs), technology vendors, etc.—in the DPI approach can catalyse the ecosystem to collectively help drive the Philippine digital transformation journey.
In the first 12 months, Co-Develop will work closely with Ateneo de Manila University, to ensure we collectively set the right direction, create positive energy around the TRL, and demonstrate value to government departments, Ateneo University, DPGs, and other involved stakeholders. While there will be a lot of learning and rapid evolution in this first year, we broadly aim to achieve the following:
Implementations Using The DPI Approach
Government digitisation projects take a DPI approach to successful implementations
Technical Knowhow
Government teams (and where applicable, Philippines private sector entities) are trained in operating and maintaining DPG instances within their digitisation efforts
Creative Exploration
Exploring ways to expand offerings, including creating experience centers for hands-on interaction with DPG capabilities, hosting hackathons to encourage local developers to utilize TRL tools for breaking down platform silos, and nurturing an open-source community to contribute code to DPGs.
Contact us for more information on the Technical Resource Labs.
info@codevelop.fund