How to support teams building Digital Public Goods? The DPG Accelerator Guide is part of The Digital Public Goods (DPG) Alliance’s efforts to support countries create enabling environments for pipelines of DPGs. It’s designed as a guiding document for the use of Pathfinder country partners such as the UNICEF Country Offices, their Government Counterparts and accelerators. It provides a set of tools, resources and contents on engaging the local startup ecosystem to create Digital Public Goods, as defined by The Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation; Open-source software, open data, open artificial intelligence models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable international and domestic laws, standards, and best practices and do no harm.
The Digital Public Goods Alliance was launched in 2019 by key champions: Governments of Norway and Sierra Leone, UNICEF and iSPIRT with the aim of accelerating attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.
As digitization and connectivity become more widespread, a digital divide is also widening where 3.6 billion people are not able to access or contribute to digital products and services that could improve their lives. The Internet began as a publicly managed network with an open-source ethos that encouraged collaboration and experimentation. Over time, however, the percentage of the Internet that is open-source and public has significantly decreased. Hence, much of the most useful information online is not easily accessible, especially to those who need it the most.
Access to digital solutions today is often limited through copyright regimes and proprietary systems. Most existing digital public goods are not easily accessible because they are unevenly distributed in terms of the language, content and infrastructure required to access them. Even when the relevant digital public good or open-source solution is found, support and additional investment are still required to scale them up and successfully implement them.
The Alliance, supported by the UN Secretary’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, defined digital public goods as: “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm and are of high relevance for achievement of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”
Countries leading pathfinding pilots show leadership in developing, scaling and investing in DPGs with a commitment to showcase and share these experiences with other countries and the broader Alliance. All countries – not limited to pathfinder countries - are encouraged to leverage the outcomes of the work of the DPG Alliance in terms of vetted DPGs, as well as operational tools and guides.
This document aims to collect as many relevant cases, templates and resources to help accelerate setting up a pipeline of locally developed DPGs that are addressing national priorities and are regionally scalable. It seeks to cover all the crucial steps from scoping the initiative with public and private partners to graduating DPGs providing tools and templates along the way that can be tailored as needed.
examples and templates under the following work areas:
- Why Digital Public Goods?
- Identifying the scope of the accelerator addressing national priorities
- Engaging private sector and local community (?) partners
- Leveraging government led programs and initiatives
- Selecting and managing a local acceleration partner
- Running calls for applications
- Acceleration Program Design and content
- Monitoring and evaluation
- Communications and digital marketing
- Follow on funding
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