Building the Human Infrastructure Behind Digital Public Infrastructure

Last week, I had the chance to visit Namibia and engage with a variety of thoughtful professionals who work across a wide range of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) intersection points. There’s an important conversation happening here about the role  DPI can play in the country’s next chapter, particularly in creating a more inclusive and connected digital economy.

Joined by David Porteous and Robert Karanja, we engaged with key Namibian stakeholders on the opportunities Digital Public Infrastructure could create for greater financial inclusion. We deliberately brought together people from different parts of the ecosystem, including financial service providers, fintech and technology actors, policy and regulatory voices, civil society and research organisations, and regional and international DPI practitioners. Unsurprisingly, this is an essential mix for these types of discussions. As most already know, DPI is about much, much more than technology.

Digital identity, instant payments, data exchange, and other shared digital systems only create value when the surrounding ecosystem works too. This publicly means that we need to engage the institutions, governance, skills, trust, coordination, and people who understand how the pieces fit together.

One of the big risks for the success of DPI is that you can find countries that are rolling out major DPI investments, but the financial service providers, civil society, and other essential stakeholders are not aware of DPI thinking and planning taking place in their own countries. This is an important gap.

If DPI is going to reshape how identity, payments, and data work in an economy, then banks, fintechs, mobile operators, civil-society organisations, and other practitioners cannot only be brought in once the infrastructure has effectively been designed. They need opportunities to understand what is happening, contribute practical use cases, challenge assumptions, prepare their own organisations, and help shape implementation.

The discussions last week also reinforced something we have learned repeatedly through Digital Frontiers’ work in financial inclusion: the professional infrastructure around a system matters as much as the technical infrastructure itself. What this means, quite simply, is that we need to build communities of people who understand the issues, trust one another enough to engage honestly, learn from successes and failures elsewhere, and can connect across institutional boundaries.

Our conversation in Namibia has us therefore thinking about a more sustained DPI Forum model, with regular country-level exchanges bringing together public, private-sector, and civil-society actors, linked across countries and supported by relevant technical experts. Our global Digital Frontiers alumni and practitioner network gives us a particularly strong foundation for finding and connecting those people. Like everything we do at Digital Frontiers, our aim is to help build a critical mass of informed practitioners and local champions around DPI and connect those country-level conversations into wider regional and global learning.

The conversations in Namibia also reinforced a practical question: if meaningful participation from financial institutions, regulators, technology providers, civil society organisations, and other stakeholders is essential to successful DPI implementation, how do we ensure those groups have a shared understanding of the concepts, opportunities, and trade-offs involved?

This need for practitioner capability is one of the reasons we’ve designed a specialised learning journey focused on DPI. In 2025, we introduced our Introduction to Digital Public Infrastructure (iDPI) course to equip professionals across the public and private sectors with the practical knowledge, strategic insight, shared language, and tools needed to engage in the design, funding, and oversight of DPI initiatives.

Building on that foundation, we recently launched Digital Public Infrastructure Essentials: The Identity Layer for professionals looking to develop a deeper understanding of the identity component within the DPI stack. Designed for practitioners across government, regulation, development, and the private sector.

A big thank you to David Porteous (Founder and CEO at Integral: Governance Solutions) and Robert Karanja (Founder and Senior Advisor at DPI4Africa and Digital Frontiers Institute alum) for helping shape the discussion, to our own Kauthar Conrad (Community and Professional Development Manager at Digital Frontiers) for bringing everything together, and especially to everyone who joined us in Windhoek and contributed so openly. There is a lot more to explore here. But I increasingly think that if we want better digital infrastructure, we also need to invest deliberately in the people and professional networks that make it work.

 

By Todd Malone (Chief Executive Officer at Digital Frontiers)

 

(Article originally shared on Digital Frontiers on 12 October 2026)