By: Nana
Appiah Acquaye
Sierra Leone has reaffirmed
its commitment to building digital public infrastructure (DPI) with safeguards
incorporated into systems from the outset, as countries and development
partners discussed stronger approaches to digital transformation at the 81st
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81).
Minister of Communication,
Technology and Innovation Salima Bah made the remarks during the high-level
plenary, “From Commitment to Ownership: Advancing DPI with Safeguards,” co-led
by the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies and the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), with Co-Develop and the Center for Financial
Inclusion.
“We are not inventing these
challenges. They are global challenges, and it is essential that we follow
universal global standards as we think through them,” Minister Bah said.
She described digital public
infrastructure as the shared layer that a country builds once and upon which
other systems and services can operate, including digital identity, payments
and the exchange of data between institutions.
According to Minister Bah,
effective DPI can help extend services to people who have previously been
invisible to formal systems, while poorly designed systems can create exclusion
at scale.
Sierra Leone is seeking to
build its digital infrastructure with safeguards incorporated into the design
rather than added later. As part of this effort, the Ministry of Communication,
Technology and Innovation, in partnership with UNICEF, recently brought
together 16 government ministries, financial institutions, academia and civil
society.
The stakeholders worked to
map how digital systems serve children from birth registration through to
employment, while examining the threats and protections associated with each
use case.
The UNGA81 plenary focused
on moving from commitment to ownership, with countries and partners putting new
commitments on the table and establishing a public tracker to monitor progress.
Sierra Leone participated
with work already underway and expressed support for the Universal DPI
Safeguards Framework as the standard against which digital public
infrastructure should be developed.
