Making DPI Work for Children: From Country Experience to Implementer Tactics

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is increasingly becoming the backbone of public service delivery, and the decisions made at the infrastructure level will define children's access to health, education, and social protection. Access to birth registration, health care, school enrolment, and social protection depends not on any single system, but on the ability of multiple government agencies to share data securely and reliably across administrative boundaries. 

Yet experience shows that children's specific needs, rights, and risk profiles are rarely made explicit at the DPI design stage. When this happens, DPI can unintentionally reinforce fragmentation, exclusion, or gaps in safeguards, despite strong intentions to improve efficiency and integration. 

This session examines what makes DPI work for child rights in practice, from the core building blocks and safeguards to the implementation realities and governments’ choices that shape outcomes for children across health, education and social protection. 

Pairing high-level country testimony with implementer-level tactics and insight from CDPI's advisory experience across national DPI deployments and UNICEF’s global perspective on child rights, the session surfaces operational gaps, institutional dynamics, and the speed-vs-safeguards trade-off that shape outcomes for children.

It aims to: 

• Identify the DPI building blocks that are most critical for inclusive service delivery for children
• Draw out country-level lessons that can advance better design and decisions on DPI
• Explore practical implementation and deployment approaches, including rapid deployment, operational models, resourcing and pathways from pilot to scale
• Examine the legal, technical, and institutional safeguards needed to protect child rights at the infrastructure level; and
• Consolidate field-tested implementer tactics and a potential roadmap to develop DPI around an agreed child-centred public problem (e.g. ensuring every child is counted and continuously served from birth registration through school enrolment to social protection)

Partners: Dominican Republic, UNICEF, Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI)

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