Digital Public Infrastructure for African Governments

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) refers to the foundational digital systems that enable governments, businesses, and citizens to interact at scale. Unlike specific applications — a tax portal, a licensing system — DPI consists of the underlying layers that make many applications possible: digital identity, interoperable payments, and secure data exchange.

The concept was articulated most clearly through India's 'India Stack' — the combination of Aadhaar (biometric identity), UPI (unified payments interface), and DigiLocker (verified document storage) that enabled services ranging from direct benefit transfers to instant bank account opening to be delivered at the scale of 1.4 billion citizens.

The defining characteristics of effective DPI are: openness (APIs and standards are publicly documented and available to any developer); interoperability (systems can communicate with each other regardless of vendor or implementation); inclusivity (design explicitly addresses the needs of citizens with limited connectivity, literacy, or formal documentation); and governance (accountability structures ensure the infrastructure serves public rather than private interests).

India's Aadhaar system, despite legitimate privacy concerns that must be taken seriously, demonstrated that biometric identity at billion-person scale is achievable. More importantly, the introduction of an open API layer around Aadhaar — the India Stack — enabled a generation of fintech and GovTech applications that would have been impossible without the foundational identity layer.

Estonia's X-Road data exchange layer is the most sophisticated DPI deployment in the world by interoperability depth. Launched in 2001, X-Road connects over 900 public and private sector databases, allowing any authorised query to pull verified data from any connected system. The result is a government that can pre-fill most forms on behalf of citizens because it already holds the relevant data — with citizen consent — in connected systems.

Kenya's M-Pesa and the subsequent development of the Konza Techno City ecosystem demonstrate an African model for DPI. M-Pesa's mobile money infrastructure became a de facto payments layer that enabled everything from micro-loans to government salary disbursements, without requiring a traditional banking relationship.

Nigeria has made significant investments in digital government over the past decade. The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has enrolled over 100 million Nigerians in the National Identification Number (NIN) system. The Bank Verification Number (BVN) provides a financial identity layer with over 50 million records. NIBSS (Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System) operates a payments clearing infrastructure.

Yet these systems remain largely siloed. NIN, BVN, and NIBSS operate under different agencies with different data standards and no common interoperability layer. A state government agency wishing to verify a citizen's identity against a payment record and a land registry entry must negotiate three separate data-sharing agreements, implement three separate API integrations, and manage three separate security relationships.

The consequence is that Nigerian government services remain manual at their core. Even where digital front-ends have been built, back-office processes frequently require physical document verification because there is no trusted digital pathway to the authoritative record.

Based on TNG's experience delivering government technology systems, we propose a three-phase DPI roadmap for Nigeria.

Phase One (Years 1-2) — Federate Existing Identity Systems: Establish an interoperability layer — modelled on Estonia's X-Road or India's eKYC API — that allows authorised queries across NIN, BVN, and state-level identity databases without physically merging the underlying databases. This is technically straightforward and politically feasible because it does not require any agency to surrender ownership of its data.

Phase Two (Years 2-4) — Build the Data Exchange Layer: Extend the interoperability layer to cover land registries, business registrations, vehicle and driver licensing, and professional credentials. Each new data source multiplies the value of the network. TNG's experience with Lagos State shows that a well-designed data exchange API can reduce the time to verify a business licence from 3 weeks to under 10 minutes.

Phase Three (Years 4-7) — Enable the Application Layer: Once the identity and data exchange layers are stable and trusted, the application layer — the citizen-facing services, the developer ecosystem, the civil society tools — can be built by the private sector and civil society at scale. Government's role shifts from building every application to curating the infrastructure that makes applications possible.