What are Digital Public Goods?
The Digital Public Goods Alliance defines digital public goods (DPGs) as open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain Sustainable Development Goals. To know more about DPGs, click here.
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India is making great strides in building population-scale DPGs. Our experience with DPGs in education, governance identity authentication, health, through Sunbird, Digit, DigiLocker and Divoc are indicative of the huge potential for impact this approach holds.
"Sunbird is a set of configurable, extendable, modular building blocks for learning and human development designed for scale and open sourced under MIT license. It is designed to support multiple languages and multiple teaching and learning solutions by providing the building blocks for the development of platforms and learning solutions to suit various use cases, contexts and needs. Sunbird has been developed by EkStep Foundation to fulfill its education mission to enhance access to learning opportunities at scale for millions of learners particularly in the K-12 space. Sunbird building blocks are being used in diverse areas such as education, health, lifelong learning, among others." Read more about Sunbird here.
"DIVOC stands for Digital Infrastructure for Verifiable Open Credentialing. DIVOC is a DPGA (Digital Public Goods Alliance) listed public good that enables countries to digitally orchestrate large scale vaccination and public health programs using open source digital infrastructure. It is recognised by 96+ countries globally and used by over one-fifth of the world’s population. It is built on top of the generalized electronic registry and credentialing framework of OpenSABER project under Sunbird RC Registry and Credentialing. DIVOC is an open source project under the MIT License, created in India by the eGov Foundation." Read more about DIVOC here.
"DIGIT is a platform which is open source and open API powered for developers, enterprises and citizens to build new applications and solutions. The ready-to-use platform helps achieve quicker implementation timeframes and helps local governments achieve process improvements, accountability and transparency at various levels of administration. DIGIT is a manifestation of Societal Platform thinking, a systemic method to resolve complex societal challenges with speed, at scale, and sustainably (Societal Platform is an initiative of EkStep Foundation). DIGIT has been developed by the eGov Foundation." Read more about DIGIT here.
"DigiLocker is a flagship initiative of Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY), Government of India under Digital India programme. DigiLocker empowers citizens by providing access to authentic digital documents to citizen’s digital document wallet. The issued documents in DigiLocker system are deemed to be at par with original physical documents. They can be accessed by Citizens anytime, anywhere. It facilitates faster delivery of government schemes and services. It enables paperless governance and reduces the administrative overhead by minimizing the use of paper and curtailing the verification process." Read more about DigiLocker here.