As COVID-19 spread across the world last year, its impacts were fast and society-wide, ravaging health and livelihoods alike. The question quickly became: How can our societies respond with equivalent speed, scale, and breadth?

Digital systems played a key role in this response. Sri Lanka, for example, built and deployed a real-time COVID-19 screening, contact tracing, and monitoring system and began deploying it within days after the first case of COVID-19 was registered in the country. The system helped the nation hold COVID-19 deaths to one-third of the global per capita rate thus far.

This was true for the social and economic response as well. In Togo, the government led a coalition in implementing a digital cash program that began disbursing payments to more than 570,000 informal sector workers in the early months of the pandemic. These alleviated suffering and helped the country’s most vulnerable people comply with stay-at-home orders. Globally, cash transfer programs nearly doubled compared to pre-COVID levels.

These cases demonstrate two new mindsets around digital systems for development:

The first mindset regards digital systems as part of society-level infrastructure. Sri Lanka and Togo implemented relatively strong and high-coverage digital systems for health data management and cash transfer, respectively. These systems connected sectors and citizens, creating common, flexible platforms for responding to the pandemic—or any other societal-scale threat.

These are examples of “digital public infrastructure” (DPI)—systems that allow data to flow seamlessly while accomplishing basic, but widely useful functions at a societal scale. DPI systems build on internet access and mobile connectivity to allow people to access public services, do business, and collaborate effortlessly with each other. These functions include but aren’t limited to identity, transactions and money transfers, and data exchanges in health and other sectors.

Read the full article about co-designed digital public infrastructure by Liv Marte Nordhaug and Kevin O'Neil at The Rockefeller Foundation.