Last year, the DPGA Secretariat launched its first-ever set of Calls for Collaborative Actions as a way to galvanise members, DPG product owners, and other stakeholders around priority actions needed for advancing collective impact.

Reflecting the priority that countries worldwide are giving to building and evolving their digital public infrastructure, which can also be seen in the 50-in-5 Campaign co-coordinated by the DPGA Secretariat alongside Co-Develop, one of the four calls is for “250 million USD in financing so that DPGs that enable the implementation of safe, inclusive and interoperable digital public infrastructure can be supported until 2030”.

2025 Key Activities and Stakeholder Outputs

An initial step taken by the DPGA Secretariat was the creation of the DPG4DPI Collection, in order to point to the most DPI-relevant solutions available on the DPG Registry. Criteria for determining which DPGs should go into the collection have been developed with inputs from Co-Develop and the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), and the DPG4DPI Collection will be expanded when additional relevant DPGs are identified.

We have also convened multiple discussions with relevant funders, including the EkStep Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), and the Steele Foundation for Hope. In addition to encouraging new financing, another objective of these conversations has been to understand the motivations of different funders that are interested in supporting DPGs4DPI, and also how they see their financing as part of broader sustainability and contribution models. We are aware that several of the funders we have convened have made, or are planning to make, new financial commitments for DPGs4DPI in 2025, and we will provide updated numbers once they are public.

We have also engaged additional stakeholders interested in contributing to the call in different ways, such as the sharing of learnings and best practices and case studies. These contributions were from UN agencies such as UNICEF, product owners like OpenCRVS, and civil society organisations including the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). A key suggestion made by OKFN was to engage multilateral development banks more in evolving DPG sustainability models, given their important role as both grant providers and lenders to countries implementing their digital public infrastructure. This is particularly relevant given the large cuts to international development assistance in 2025, which are making funders ask more questions about the cost-effectiveness of interventions. As freely adoptable and adaptable, and open-source components, DPGs are extremely well positioned to be at the forefront of a new international development paradigm built around reuse, sharing, and collaboration, but only if we create the right enabling environment and recognise their broader value.

Next Steps - Priorities for 2026

In 2026, we will continue to mobilise stakeholders to achieve the 250 million USD goal set out in this call. However, we will increasingly see the effort to mobilise grant financing as part of developing a more comprehensive sustainability model. Our goal is for this to be a model where multilateral development banks, private sector companies, government agencies, and other stakeholders involved in DPGs4DPI planning, implementation, and maintenance processes all contribute back so that the core project remains robust and relevant.