As OSOR has reported on earlier, the United Nations has endorsed the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), which is cofounded by Norway, Sierra Leone, the Indian think tank iSPIRT and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). It is a multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries using “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content’.
On 1 June 2022, the Alliance will start the process to publish and gather support for its upcoming Digital Public Goods Charter. The charter will be open for signatories from national governments, civil society as well as public and private institutions. Signing the charter “represents a commitment to advancing the use of digital public goods which can enable countries to build safe, trusted, and inclusive digital public infrastructure at scale.”
The charter’s aim is to catalyse the organisations’ work to prioritise and support the technical solutions that are needed for inclusive digital public infrastructure across the world.
More specifically, the DPG Charter is meant to coordinate and mobilise high level stakeholders, investments, and actions in order to ensure:
- country capacity to build, test, implement, maintain, and govern digital public goods that best address their countries infrastructural needs;
- the legal, regulatory, and policy frameworks as well as the public institutions required to ensure individuals’ data is safe and protected from misuse and provides equitable access to the benefits of digitalization;
- sufficient and sustainable funding and funding models that enable DPGs to deliver stable, best-in-class digital solutions that address country needs;
- vibrant commercial ecosystem of vendors and services who enable rapid deployments and integrations at scale; and
- thriving software communities that contribute code and support products.
The process starts June 1, and then the DPGA will present the Charter framework at a joint event held in New York as part of the United Nations General Assembly September 13-17. Leading up to the event, the DPGA will conduct consultations with the public and private sectors meant to feed into a report presented at the event. This report will detail key Digital Public Goods needs and priorities, based on consultations with the public and private sector.
For OSOR readers who are interested in participating in this process, you can sign up for news here.