Digital Public Goods Accelerator Guide - Tokyo 2024

all right and for our next talk uh we have Cheryl NE um listed as our speaker um so yeah I'd love to welcome Cheryl up on the stage um from UNICEF office of innovation and uh we are a little bit ahead of schedule so Cheryl if you want to take an extra 10 minutes or open for Q&A you're more than welcome all right let's give it up for Cheryl um how's everyone doing today Energy's low or high um so who knows what digital public goods are in this room okay so we got a few um so I guess this is why i' I've been invited to talk here today uh I'm Cheryl I'm the digital public goods capacity building adviser at unicef's office of innovation um and your first question might be why is UNICEF like even here like why are we in this space don't we support children who are living in poverty but actually unicef's mandate is to advocate for the protection of children's rights and to help meet their basic needs and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential and we're living in this world that is obviously technology rules our lives um and technology and digital solutions they affect children's rights um they can be an instrument of power and that power sometimes could not be used for good could be bad um and it must not be developed by without young people's participation because at the end of the day they they are the future so who are we to also decide what their future is um and today actually on our team I work under the UNICEF Ventures uh we have a venture fund and we actually have a crypto fund that invests in early stage uh Frontier Tech solutions that are solely open- source and actually all from emerging markets um we are working on real world problems like it's not about how fast can I get my food delivered or you know how do I minimize my scrolling time on on social media it's really working on access to Quality education Access to Health Services working on solutions that are doing cash transfers and humanitarian crisises um and from all of this work that UNICEF Venture fund has done um I got hired and 2021 to basically put together this digital public goods accelerator guide and initially it was basically to um help startups but particularly startup accelerators Innovation hubs um to support and designing digital public goods but the biggest challenge and I think I see it in the room here is like what the heck is digital public goods anyways so why should we build for it and I think we have to start from the very beginning and actually take a look back into into history so um this picture here is from the Berlin Conference in the late 1800s um and at this time the European countries only had influence on the west coast of Africa or just on the coast so 80% of this was still remained under traditional and local control after this conference it actually established partitions of Africa and it became a playground for foreign countries and Outsiders because they were extracting the mineral wealth and that wealth wasn't for the Africans which meant that the Fate for the entire state was not left up to the African and this is it now it's capturing our human life and it's a form of digital colonization in a way it's a social order that extends to extraction but in new ways it's extracting our data it's extracting capacity of people employment opportunities and infrastructure and while people will say colonialism was years ago and it's not happening now which you know I tend to disagree but to those we say there could be no capitalism without the extraction of resources so I guess in the context of Japan we can take um let's say we have a guy who's in his 20s his name is Mr a he's living in Tokyo he's scrolling on Instagram for three hours a day he's using YouTube premium he's using line to chat with his friends he's using Amazon Prime services to get things shipped but none of these are made in Japan services so this situation which is caused by a lack of domestic use of Japanese products it's actually deepening the digital deficit and this is why also it's depreciating the yen in the long run um just in the past 5 months of 2024 uh the Yen has depreciated 14% year-over-year um because its digital Imports have far numbered its exports and this digital deficit it's becomed a structural factor and changed in the Japanese economy so this is why we need to start building Technology Solutions that are for the people built and maintained by the people the public and actually giving power to it's not putting power over so we're not relying on these big tech companies that are taking and extracting all of our resources and now the the question is um how can countries achieve digital sovereignty while having a functional infrastructure which is for the people and this is where digital public goods come in the official definition of digital public goods was actually coined in 2019 um and that the technical definition is that it its open AI models open software open data open content Open Standards that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices they do no harm and they help attain the UN sustainable development goals um and this definition was uh it came from the UN secretary secretary General's road map to digital cooporation so this is all new um but at least there's a there's a set definition because when people talk about digital public infrastructure there's no set term and I think that's where there's a lot of debates around it but this is set there's a framework around it um and when we think of public goods that the we all know it's non-competitive non- Rous and it has to be non-excludable which means it's accessible to all not just all to use but all to modify reuse adapt into any situation and so there is this big um not not so big actually now it's growing uh but the digital public goods Alliance it's a multi-stakeholder initiative that was launched in 2019 UNICEF was a co-founding member of this along with the German government I think tank um and Norway and now there's over 37 members that are not just of government or development organizations GitHub is part of this the government of Singapore the government of Estonia as well um and just to say that if you go to the digital public goods. I believe uh you can see there's a registry of already certifi I would say registered um digital public goods that are spanning across the technology areas that we saw before and also across the UN scg goals as well and for all of the businesses I don't know if you are running businesses or work for a business but the market for dpgs is estimated to be100 billion by 2030 um and this was from an eiy report and that number represents the opportunity for system integrators and for your business as well um in terms of those opportunities so this is the n this is the DPG standard this is a framework when we're thinking about for public goods and of course just to highlight here uh that means that you're using an approved open licensing but there's also good documentation and there's clear ownership I think a lot of the issues around digital public infrastructure is that it lacks like who owns it and who is actually going to maintain it and that's why having these specific indicators is crucial for that sustainability um it does best practices as well as privacy security and other components of doing no harm by Design um and to go back to that slide for the people when we think of Open Source open source could be used for commercial reasons right it could be used big companies can build off of it and basically like take our our data from this which is happening now um but dpgs are actually built around a specific public Challenge and it has to be focused on the people uh an example is uh right now there is two billion people people that are unbanked in the world um UNICEF Venture fund we invested in a company called Rumson in 20 uh actually don't I forgot the date but this is in Nepal um and the solution is rahad it's a mobile based um blockchain token basically to manage and monitor the aid transactions for emergency response and recovery programs um particularly usually when there's a natural disaster where marginalized communities don't have access to cash or that they're affected each of these families basically they receive tokens or QR codes on their mobile phones to enable them to basically claim the cash from the municipality office um and the strategy was to use open source in the implementation so that the cost of the code itself is saved and instead it's directly proportional to the operational expenses of actually running the blockchainbased platform and other services to make this mobile mobile um based solution work like SMS and integrated voice response system and here the biggest Advantage is the real-time reconciliation data for central government of Nepal to actually see the transactions and transparency to all the key stakeholders okay so digital public goods they need to be built and maintained by the people which is the open source ecosystem and Beyond so the open source ecosystem it serves as a foundation for society Innovative strength competitiveness and democracy and we often don't realize how much we actually depend on digital infrastructure until it stops working um I think the biggest example that we all saw was that when the Microsoft um basically crashed because of crowd strike it relied on crowd strike 8.5 million um Windows devices were actually um they basically experienced the blue screen of death um and that is basically where flights are being cancelled um non-urgent surgeries were being delayed medical visits were basically cancelled and probably a lot more that interrupted businesses and it's a really Stark reminder of digital monoculture when we rely on these big tech companies um and I like to say like yeah when Microsoft sneezes we get we catch a digital cold essentially whereas in the case of Linux open source software is built on on transparency and collaboration and I think the problem here is that two people too few people are actually testing the functionality and then returning the enhancements to the open source ecosystem to actually make this product even better um and that's you know in the way it's not sustainable or functional functional and again this is why it's crucial to be building open source ecosystems and the difference between just open source and dpgs here again is what kind of people who is this ecosystem when you're solving for a specific Challenge in a particular area or city or whatever it is um the people are the beneficiaries it's the government the ministry that's around it it's the development partners that are trying to build these communities to actually make this product better where the open- source ecosystem they might not necessarily care about that specific issue so you have to make sure that the values of whoever that open source ecosystem pertains to the actual product in order to continue to maintain it um just a little bit of a fun fact the supply side of Open Source software U is actually an estimated $415 billion um and the demand side is valued at $8.8 trillion and what that means is that there's these big companies and firms that actually rely on open source software but there's a huge gap in terms of this Supply and in this case this Demand only 5% of this is actually created by open- Source software developers meaning that there's a huge opportunity for firms and developers to start creating open source and filling this demand for these not just large companies but on that DPG Market um of a hundred billion dollar so um this means that there's that opportunity to build but also to build capacity and demystify like open source in a way because people think that oh if I open- Source it I'm going to lose money um and so this is where for us at UNICEF um we invest again in the beginning I mentioned we invest in early stage open- Source Solutions and particularly in uh the people that actually are living in those countries themselves because they know the context the best we're not Outsourcing it to a a bunch of McKenzie Consultants or people that actually don't know what the context is um so UNICEF has invested in 81 startups across 37 countries particularly in seed and growth funding and 68% of our companies have actually been able to secure further funding from other investors which is actually better than the average of the startups at this stage um and seven of our companies have actually been acquired by other companies or have successfully exited as well with their open source Solutions so um now we come to building digital public goods it's about the power to and not power over and I think we need to reenter the questions of digitization um and sovereignty around power too so um we're asking uh those that are actually affected like what do they need it's not about how can I Outsource a tech or find a tech company to basically build that software or already using an existing soft Ware from a big company which is happening now there's a lot of humanitarian organizations that don't really understand how technology works and they think okay yeah I I I trust Microsoft I trust um Amazon because they already know what they're doing but at the same time then they're locked in for years on years and then who's going to maintain it where's the money coming from and so it's not sustainable to be Outsourcing the these big tech companies to be quite honest um and here I think this is a big question so of what is the sustainability of dpgs and I think when you're creating dpgs um it just starts as any business would um it starts by understanding the problem of course of what you're solving a lot of companies uh if they are thinking of okay if the government open sources uh or they're procuring open source Solutions why would I want to open source my product right um and I think you need to think of these questions as as a what if Theory so what if you build your business on software and share it under an open- Source license and somebody else uses it what if someone actually uses it to make money what if someone uses it and makes more money than me or even like a huge Grand sum of money with my open source software of course as a business you think that's not okay um but that's fundamental to how open source works and if you don't have a a business model that you believe will override any discomfort that they will cause you then I suggest you not to open- Source Your solution the question is how much do you actually care about the problem that you're trying to solve and a really interesting actually example of this is a company we invested in called stat wig it's a supply chain blockch uh supply chain and a blockchain powered um solution basically that tracks endtoend products along a supply chain basically solving the challeng that the stakeholders across a supply chain they don't talk to each other there's cold chain failures if they're trying to keep a temperature in a way so they have to be able to track this across and for them they wanted to solve the problem and their customers are for the government it's for a development issue there's an issue around it but at the same time they use their solution for a bigger corporate who needed their solution um which was ab and Bev to actually track like um beer along a supply chain but they found this open- Source solution they could have implemented it but they needed the expertise of this provider to actually be able to implement it so that creation of their business it didn't start off with oh I need to open source my solution because you know this company wants to procure it or there's a public call for procurement there was a problem that needed to be solved at first and um this is why and this is what we're actually trying to do and I guess part of our team's job is really to build the capacity the capacity of stakeholders including government but primarily young people um and uh yeah it's probably the most empowering thing to to work on this but uh we have uh Lebanon which they have a social Innovation program there's an accelerator um program UNICEF startup lab in Ghana where uh we're working with entrepreneurs to basically develop digital public goods and then there is um in sier Leon they're actually going around schools to build the capacity around open source and digital public goods um because again these young people are going to be the future of the company uh of the countries um and that they will be then maintaining all of these digital Solutions and so there can be no equable digital transformation and digital public infrastructure without digital public goods we must see the design and maintenance of public infrastructure as a public task because let's say in 25 years the countries that we're working with we're building the young people's capacity um for example if we think of Sierra Leon they're prioritizing having digital public goods in their digital public infrastructure they want ownership of their infrastructure of those products they're right now building the capacity of young people around around this so that they can be the maintainers of the future um and that they at the end of the day Sierra Leon will have a healthy maintained digital public infrastructure system whereas in Japan we have to ask ourselves are they currently having an open- Source procurement for digital public goods in the public interest is there a code development of Open Source software or is there a building capacity for stakeholders to understand the importance of how to build maintain and contribute to DPG for DPI and if not then the country may be deepening in a digital deficit locked in facing the extractions of resources capacity and infrastructure by large tech companies which then goes back to the history lesson of well what we call digital colon uh digital colonization instead of actually achieving digital sovereignty thank you [Applause]