 Hello, everybody, and welcome to this session on scaling digital public infrastructure. The last 18 months or so have reiterated the value of digital systems to verify our identities online, to make payments, to share data, to support a range of everyday interactions. Yet access to such critical infrastructure is very unevenly distributed across the world still. And we can still improve and harmonize the rules governing such systems. Today's panel will explore how to scale the efforts of various forum partners, governments, funders, businesses, and civil society organizations to address some of these gaps. And we'd love to hear from you throughout the session. For those of you joining us through top link, please use the chat window, the link, the Slido link in the chat window to let us know your questions for the panel and comments. I would also like to welcome our moderator for today, Michelle Javando, who is leading programming at the Omidiar Network, a leading social change venture and investor in the space. Michelle, over to you. Manju, thank you so much for that warm welcome. And we welcome you from wherever you are tuning in. If you also are joining on social media, our hashtags are hashtag SDIS21 and of course, hashtag DPI for all. I am incredibly excited to get started with a conversation on how we expand access to digital identity. And joining are some of distinguished leaders who have been leading this conversation all around the globe. First, I'm happy to bring forth Bald Vigar Solil, the director general of NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, which also manages the Digital Public Goods Alliance. Bald, thank you so much for coming today. Next, we have Sigve Brecky, who is the president and CEO of the Telenoor Group with telecom operations in the Nordics and Asia with over 188 million customers. He also serves as the distinguished chair of the GSMA Foundation. Sigve, thank you. And finally, last but not least ever is minister Sina Lawson, who is the minister of Post Digital Economy and Technology Innovation for Togo. Minister Lawson, thank you so much for joining us. So I am going to get right into this conversation. And again, I encourage the audience to chime in with any questions that you have throughout. But we have a funder, a minister, and a business CEO who are all joining us on this panel. From each of your various perspectives and roles, I'd love for you to share with us why you're involved in this work and what you think are the key barriers to universal digital public infrastructure. Minister Lawson, we'll start with you. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. It's an honor for me to be here today. The reason why I'm involved as a cabinet member, it's in terms of digital, I have to be involved into this work, but more importantly, it's the basis for the country's development. There is no way you can achieve development, economic and social development without using digital. And because we're building, because we're doing a lot of foundational work, the way we build digital system does matter in terms of the society we want to create. So we've been involved in transforming and in digital transformation of the country and of the administration with simple rules, such as enable and increasing transparency in the process, such as informing in real time the citizens. With the pandemic, we were able to set up a digital cash transfer program and we distributed approximately $34 million to a little bit less than one million individuals. So it was a scheme using a universal basic income. And what is absolutely innovative in that is that first, it was entirely digital. Second, in order to improve the way that we were targeting beneficiaries, we used machine learning and artificial intelligence. And third, we informed every day where we were making payment, we would inform the population in real time. So these are changes that can only occur when you use digital. And we do believe that anything we do within this ministry has the potential to profoundly change the way Togo is managed. So we have a transformational work and responsibility in every project that we lead. So now to answer the question that you ask in terms of the barriers, I think that the first barrier when you ask a developing country is obviously digital divide. That's the most obvious thing that comes into mind. But you also have to understand a lot of countries are building their systems in silos. Not only countries are building systems in silos, but within a country, within the administration. Again, a lot of the platforms are built just serving one purpose. And our objective in Togo is to increase interoperability, both using, of course, technology, but also regulation. And it's with simple explanations of how that we want to use interoperability so that when the citizens look at the government, it's one. There is one entry to any public service. And I think this is, again, something that is worth mentioning and that is the way to fight against all these barriers. The second thing that I have to stress upon is all the legal and regulatory work we've done. We were able to adopt privacy laws. Togo is one of the first African countries having taken privacy laws, data privacy laws, and cybersecurity laws because in terms of barriers, trust is key to lower barriers to scaling digital public infrastructure. And in order to increase trust, you also have to set up a legal and regulatory framework which enables that to happen. The third thing is that it's never about the technology. Everything we do is about the people. So it's very important that any old DPI project be also linked with a digital literacy component that can enable us to better train our people, to better inform them. I'll stop here for now. Well, you can stop, but all I was doing was nodding my head through your entire response. Director General, let me turn to you, your response for this first question. Well, thank you, Michel. Looking forward to the conversation here. I mean, Nourad, what we do is we partner with countries and to assist them in their development endeavors. So we basically work with global development. And we do that with countries, with UN organizations, with NGOs, and so on and so forth. And the reason why we have turned to working a lot with digital public goods is, of course, that these goods have the potential to transform what global development is, to transform the speed and the scale and what it's about. So basically, because instead of developing solutions and supporting solutions, country by country, sector by sector, we can invest in goods that can be widely shared and developed at a totally different speed, right? And that also means that they can be scaled up in real cost-efficient ways and at the very high speed. One example is, of course, the DHSI-2 health system that is being widely used around the world now. Sri Lanka developed a COVID tracking tool out of it, and it quickly spread to more than 50 countries for that. And that is also the reason why we have co-created the Alliance, like you mentioned. We believe that digital public goods is an important part of global development in the future, and that it can really change the way we deliver services and work with developments. And Sikdi, your response? Yeah, thank you, and it's a great honor to be on this panel and talk about a topic which is really close to my heart. As said in the introduction, I'm representing Tehranore, a company that comes from a small country of Norway, five million population, but have decided to move into the bigger, emerging countries in Asia. So we have almost 190 million customers in markets like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, and Malaysia. Our focus has all along been to deliver affordable connectivity services to the mass market. And with this, I've seen the potential of driving greater digital inclusion and being a part of developing societies. And that has brought us down into the countries with the large populations. And as also said, I'm also representing here as a board member of the Mobile Industry Association, GSMA, which basically is an association for all the mobile operators in the world, counting for more than five billion subscribers. What's really I'm passionate about, and I think I speak on behalf of all my colleagues in other mobile operators, is that when the last 20 years, we're all about connecting people to voice and then later data services for the first time. The next 20 years is about digital connectivity and digital inclusion. And especially in the low and the middle income countries where mobile phone is the only device you have. There are no laptops, there are no computers, there is no fixed line. And we have a strong belief that the mobile enabled services will actually be an important means to achieve the U.S. sustainability development goals. And some examples of that. Already today, around 1.8 billion people are using their mobile phones to monitor their health. 1.6 billion people are using mobile phones to access government services. 2.6 billion people are using the mobile phones for financial services. And two, more than two billion people are using mobile phones to improve their education. And that's also why this industry association has a foundation board, which I'm also sharing, where we are working together with also donors and international development communities like Norat, that board was mentioning. And this is because we also see a need to use our presence in these countries to engage and develop projects that can utilize the mobile communication as a tool to serve and support underserved and vulnerable population. And some examples of things we are working with in several countries, both in Africa and in Asia. It's the impact on financial services, health, agriculture, digital and identity, energy, water, sanitation, and so on and so forth. Then to the challenges. I will say two main challenges or obstacles. One is the lack of private public partnerships. We are struggling with getting the governments in this economies to really see that only way they can actually support their population with the services I'm talking about now is with digital means. So I really would like the governments and all the help they can get from international institution to get the governments to understand that a public-private partnership is needed. And other part is regulation. We are heavily regulated in all our countries and I support that. But we also need to be seen as someone that can support the development and the inclusion of these markets. And unfortunately, the regulations are stuck in the past and not suited then to see how digital means can be a part of the answer to focus on the development goals. Thank you. Excellent, and we'll come back to that in a few minutes. But Director General Bond, I wanna turn to one of the questions that came from the audience. We're having a conversation about the need to scale DPI, but not just DPI, good DPI. And as we're thinking about how you define what digital public goods actually means, whether we're talking about open source software or open data, open AI models and building that adhere obviously to privacy and applicable best practices. What have you been able to do in your role at NOROD to really push us to think about actually building good DPI? What makes the difference and help some of our participants today really understand what we mean when we say that? Thank you. That's a great question actually, and it's also, I mean, it's speaking to someone what was said earlier here, also about my two colleagues on the panel. But what we have been doing in the Alliance is of course working with what we call key principles of good digital public investments, trying to build some basic principles that good investments should be within. And I think if you can go through a few of them. First, it's really, really important that a digital public good actually includes and empowers everyone. I think also Sigva touched on this before. It has to be a solution that is widely available to men and women, to people with disabilities, which is a huge group in any country, to people with different political affiliations, religious affiliation, so on, to minority groups. I think that's extremely important and done in a good way. The global public infrastructure should be able to really be part of an inclusive development. So that's the first thing. Then of course building systems that is trusted by the public is also extremely important. We see now, whether it be in OECD countries or in developing countries, an issue connected to trust in our digital infrastructure. Can we actually trust the platforms we're on and so on? And this I think is a key issue when we're investing in these platforms that they have to be built in ways that can be trusted and that governments invest in making them secure also. They can be safely used. A third principle, which is really important is that they're interoperable with the other systems that a country uses. Of course, like the minister said, there's a danger that we are investing in a digital infrastructure that becomes silos in different sectors of society and silos that make it difficult to scale up investments as we go. So interoperability is also a key principle. I would also say that getting anonymized and sufficiently aggregated data flows from the digital infrastructure is really important. One of the advantages, of course, going digital is the availability of data. And if you can scale that up to be aggregated level that can be used securely, you have a huge advantage in, let's say when you're doing planning or policy or anything in a country. So those are at least some of the key principles. I love that inclusive, trusted, interoperable among of many of the great things that you just shared. Minister Lawson, I want to turn to you. Togo in particular has a number of great examples of how you've leveraged digital public infrastructure. Even the example that you shared earlier that during COVID you were able to get these emergency cash transfers to the most vulnerable. Your program, you got up and running in 10 days. And some great, particularly when you're thinking about women empowerment, you were able to get more women actually than men supported in the program. But one of the questions that I wonder, and actually some who are joining us, how did you do this work in terms of gathering resources? And how did you think about building particularly in rural communities? What are some of the steps that you took as a government to make sure that you had full scale programming that was able to reach out to particularly vulnerable rural communities? So it was a platform that was built in-house and we wanted to have a platform that where people with no internet connection could register to. So we used a USSD code, which is a short code so that people would register for free. And remember that at the time, it was also COVID. So we wanted to make sure that we wouldn't have physical interaction with beneficiaries. And it's important because when we had our first COVID case very quickly we thought about how to support the most vulnerable Togolese because oftentimes the poor people have to go out to earn their living on a daily basis. So when you implement mobility restrictions, if you don't support them, then what it means is that you're going to let them die, which is not of COVID but of hunger. So it comes down to the same. The concern we had was that we needed to identify so we don't have a unique social registry. So it was very important for us to identify who the poorest Togolese were. So we used a voter's ID because on the ID you have people's professions as they declared it when they registered to get their voter's ID. You have to know that in a country like Togo, because voter's ID is free, the majority 93% of all adults have a voter's ID whereas national ID comes with a cost and so only 30% of adults have a national ID. So we had to use the most inclusive card which was the one that was designed to be free. And that was also biometric because we wanted to make sure that the person receiving financial support was a real existing individual. But then what we also did is that we use satellite imagery to identify the poorest areas in Togo. And with the help of Berkeley, UC Berkeley, we were able to rank district from the poorest. We have 400 districts in Togo. We were able to rank district from the poorest to the richest. Then the question was, we've been a poor district and every time we would use the National Institute of Statistics to help because they would go and actually call tens, actually 15,000 individuals to check whether what the satellite imagery gave us as information was accurate. So we did on the field verification even though we didn't send people in the field, it was your phone-based verification. What we also did was that, okay, now we know that this very district is poor. How do we identify poor people within a poor district? And for this, we used artificial intelligence using mobile telecom operators, CDRs. And so with Berkeley and researchers from the Innovations for Poverty Action, which is a US-based research NGO, we were able to identify, to have the phone numbers of people who earned less than $1.25 per day. And so we can say that we are, I guess it's safe to say that we are the only country which was able to pay out some people based on what a machine and artificial intelligence said. And we did that for 140,000 people and we spent $10 million with received through the help of a US NGO. So the program, the overall program using what I would call the traditional method which was biometric ID and professions and people's location who were able to spend approximately $25 million and 10 million were just based on artificial intelligence. So we spent $34 million. So every time I tell the story, people say that what about people who don't have phones? So of course, when we talk about the digital public infrastructure, people need to have the terminals, they need to have phones, if it's phones, tablets, tablets, computers. And so what we're doing right now, we're working with the World Bank as part of a biometric ID project. We're working to find solutions to provide the poorest individuals with mobile phones and not one category of the population. It's not about providing women with phones because in a household, you need to have everybody have a phone. We need to find solutions to get everyone to have phones because a phone is no longer a device to make, to have conversation. It's a device where it's your mobile wallet. It is a device where you can actually receive information. It's a device where you can store critical your ID and other things. So this is the type of thinking that Togo, but not only Togo, most developing countries are now having and see where we've, we also are very keen to do PPP. Togo is maybe the only country in Africa that our cybersecurity agency, we created an agency and its operational arm was a company that we created through a JV with a private company, a Polish company. So we have our cybersecurity agency being operated by a JV, which was the result of a PPP because we really do believe in PPPs. So Sigwe, it was almost a perfect segue to you as we talk about innovation and public-private partnerships. Without question, we know that there's a role for each. So talk a little bit about what you imagine in the next five years would be the ideal for cooperation between the public, the private sectors, philanthropy, civil society. And then let me add one additional caveat. How do you strike the balance and the tension that sometimes arises between private companies and public data and information? How do you address that? Yeah, thanks for the question. And but also thanks to the minister and also board. They actually talked about exactly what I, I tried to talk about in my intro, the how mobile connectivity can turn into digital connectivity and actually serve several purposes. And I think that what the minister mentioned from Togo is exactly how this PPP partnership should be built to see how you can align public interests and then private interests. So I think to answer your first question, what is kind of the perfect relationship? Well, the perfect relationship is to sit down and agree. And what can mobile connectivity and digital connectivity be used for to empower the societies? And then you need to talk about how, for example, you can use mobility data as Vigar mentioned, aggregated mobility data. We are doing that in Pakistan, for example, to help the government to see how people are moving and then with that fighting the dengue fever. Another example is how you can use aggregated data also to see the movements between countries. That's a typical example on industry sitting down to solve problems for the government. Another example is also what we do in some of the Asian markets together with the governments launching an app to go into the villages to register newborn that otherwise wouldn't be a part of the society. So it's to sit down basically and to see how can our presence be helping the government. But then you also need going back to what the minister said, you need to then have regulations which is actually then in favor of making sure that there is connectivity everywhere in all the different villages, even the remote villages and find a mechanism where you make that possible. And I think that there are so many areas where commercial interests and public interest can be combined. The problem is that unfortunately different from the total government, most government is stuck in the past. They don't see how everyone having a mobile phone or a media computer in their hand can be a part of serving public needs. So that's why I'm more than happy to be on a panel like this and speak to policy makers that can talk to governments about that. Then to your data question. Again, this comes down to regulations. It's about privacy laws. And we are more than happy to discuss that as well. We had the GDPR regulations in Europe and we see that's coming into some other markets as well now. And we want to be seen as someone that you can keep your data with in a trusted basis. And again, it's possible to do that with privacy laws. It's possible to do that as the board said with anonymizing aggregating data. But again, it is a discussion between the industry and the government. So I really look forward then to more and more governments picking this up as a way to solve educational problems, solve health problems, solve financial problems and kind of bringing services that are currently for the very few in some of these countries into the masses. You know, what you said resonated so strongly with me and I just thought about why we are gathered here at the World Economic Forum, we are together committed to improving the state of the world. And as we think through that frame, scaling digital public infrastructure for everyone solves that and so thankful for each of your leadership. I'm going to share a broad question that I would like each of you to address and we'll start with you, Bold. What are some of the existing actors and new actors that we need to bring in to build the ecosystem for digital public infrastructure and how do we do a better job of building trust in the system for people engaging in this work? So who are some of the new actors that we need to bring in? How do we catalyze existing actors? I'm looking at you funders across the world who are joining us today. And finally, what else can we do to build trust? So we'll start with the director general. So you posed the easy questions today, I understand. Well, let me just reflect a little bit about that. Of course, if you're talking about actors, I think course governments and public agencies like Nourad will be important donor agencies, but also agencies in developing countries and governments throughout. There's no way you can scale up and build digital public infrastructure and invest in that without political ownership and an ownership from governments. So that's the basis. Then of course, in this field, there are strong companies throughout the world from the big multinational companies to lots of companies, smaller companies throughout the world. And I think getting the private sector to actually invest is key. We did the study from Nourad this winter, but we looked at the Nordic countries and foreign direct investments from the Nordic countries and foreign direct investments are quite huge. But of course, we know that a lot of these investments go to already developed nations, to other OECD countries. But I was surprised to find that only 0.23% of foreign direct investment from Norway is to the least developed countries. And also when we looked at lower middle income countries, that could be countries like India, the Philippines, Ghana, Kenya, for instance, only 2% to 3% of the total FDI went to these countries. And that's a huge challenge. We need more of the private investments also on telecom and digital public goods to go to where it's most, where it's really needed to developing countries. Then of course, just a few words, we can continue also later on there are a few words about the challenges. And I think one major challenge that is important is of course scalability, that we need to invest in ways that can actually, that can scale up solutions. And quite a few of the existing digital solutions are not so easily scalable. So that's really important. And also what we see in many countries is that government meant capacity to maintain and to keep good digital systems is a challenge. And that's of course a challenge also for a public agency, a donor like Noura, investing in institutions alongside the investments on the digital side. And then of course, I have to say to all the private companies and to maybe fellow donors in this call funding is of course also still a huge challenge also from the public side. When I look at what ODA, I mean, what are the development finance goes to, digital investment is still a tiny proportion of the whole thing. And if you compare it to what kind of effects it could have, it should be much bigger. Right, that is a call to action. Minister Lawson, your response, challenges, opportunities, who else we can bring in. So I think that it's not- Oh, and can I add one caveat? Because you have just done an amazing job as sharing the Toco story. What do you think you're also doing that's been different than what other countries are doing and how can we catalyze and bring them into this work? Okay, I'll stop. Well, that's a good one. So the first thing I would say is that we need to better understand the value of data. You know, earlier we were talking about that we needed to have to anonymize, I think you say in English anonymize data, we need to be able to aggregate this data. So we need new companies that know how to do that because oftentimes it's not that governments don't want to do it, it's just that they don't know how to do it. And there are now companies that exist that can do it. So we need to work with them. But when we say data is gold, there is a value for data and we need to understand how to use this data, okay? And so it comes, for example, in Africa we need to have more data scientists. So the question in terms of training is how do we find training to have data scientists but not only data scientists, when you were talking about GDPR, I think that we need new regulations that do not exist yet that really understand data and they can know how to value data, how to, you know, there's the valuation of data, there is all the questions about privacy and security but there are a whole bunch of new questions that we have yet to address and it has to do with companies that understand and structure that really understand these issues. And I don't think that right now within governments we have that level of understanding but I don't even think that most corporations have that level of understanding because all this is very new. So we need to address them the same way as we do address innovation, et cetera. We need to have a team of people dedicated into thinking about these things moving forward. And it is going to be critical for us in Africa because the way everybody talks about leapfrogging, leapfrogging, but the way that we are building these systems is so much going to impact us in the future that we need to be part of the conversation. So even as a call to action I'm saying is that yes, these conversations needs to happen but please do include us from the very beginning and not while everything has been decided. And by the way that people remember that there is a continent there I will let's see what they say. We need to be part of the conversation early on because it is about inclusion and it is about interoperability. So we need to agree on how we do things and we may diverge because our view of data may not be the same view as Europe and the US because we're not at the same level of development. So there are things that we're willing to be bold about that Europe or the US might not be as bold as we are in terms of doing so. And I also want to say that there is one area where we really need to think is everything related to digital currency. So these are also because when we talk about interoperability we're also talking about to have the world as one. So we need to find ways that we can actually transact from countries to countries from continent to continent in a way that is very simple, that is very straightforward. And again, these are areas where we have a bit of growing to do. So in terms of what we're doing that other countries are not doing I can't really start talking about what other countries are not doing and that they should be doing. I think that for us in Togo, what our ambition is to have a single platform and so that this experience that you have when you go to see an administration you need to get a form and it becomes you go to administration A and they tell you in order to produce the form you need to go to administration B and C and D and you know that the administration would also just go and gather the information that they require you to have because it's another branch of the administration providing this information. So what we want to do is that we want to make the life of our citizens easy and we want to how would I say to require the administration to really do their job which is if you have information, sort it out but don't ask the citizens to go from one place to another to try to gather information that you're supposed to have as the public sector. Siegwe, love, what do we need to do canalizing new actors? What are the challenges? How are we gonna achieve them? And then we'll get ready to wrap. Yeah, I would mention two points. The first point is that I think that donors, governments and others would be surprised how similar the sustainability agenda is between all different players. And I think that the public part of this should really understand how serious business is to actually deliver on that sustainability agenda that we all are talking about. So what I see is working is when it has to be political led, as the board said. So when there's alignment between the government with private companies, with international institutions like UNICEF, World Bank, IMF, those type of players when there is that alignment and we in addition are able to create local digital ecosystems. That's when the true public partnership comes together and that's also when trust is being built because then there's a common agenda to solve the bigger issues. The other part, it's what the ministry's talking about. And my strong advice to all governments is to get your arms around data. You need to understand privacy laws. You need to understand how data should be protected. You need to understand the importance of doing the ethical part of AI right. If not the medical data, the financial data, all the data will get out of your hand and that will create distrust. And then you can add the cybersecurity on top of that. So everything that has to data to do unfortunately again many most countries regulations, it's in the past it's not suited for the threat and the danger of distrust as we see it today. All right, last minute, you have one sentence. What is the future of digital public infrastructure? Siegve, we'll start with you, one sentence. It's a private public partnership where digital inclusion is being so abused to solve sustainability challenges. Minister Lawson. That's a tough one. I think the future of digital public infrastructure has to do with understanding data. It has to do with inclusion because it's never about the technology, it's about the people. So if we have to install DPI, we need to think about what we are trying to achieve. So it's really for me about improving the lives of people and it's about creating a better society. So I do believe in tech for good. I'm very proud every time that we use technology to do good things. So yes, it's really about including people. It's about tech for good and it's about improving governance as well. All right, Director General bring us home. The future of DPI is? The future of digital public infrastructure is bright as long as there are open access, scalable and can be easily shared. That's one sentence, I believe. It is an honor and privilege to be with you all today, turning it back over to you, Manju, and thank you for your leadership in this space as we continue to build this at scale for everyone.