Digital cooperation and the building of resilience through safe, trusted, and inclusive digital public infrastructure anchored one of the forums held during the recently ended 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Aimed at major donors and stakeholders, the forum underscored the role digital public infrastructure, including digital identity, can play in attaining the UN’s sustainable development goals. The UN‘s Development Program, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, and others sponsored the discussion, hoping to spur ideas about collaboration between nations and organizations. Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates took the opportunity, to recognize … existing infrastructure systems for financial transactions such as tax collection and aid programs. “It’s pretty fantastic that we now have open-source projects: MOSIP for the identity part and Mojaloop for financial transactions,” Gates said. Both are part of digital public infrastructures and are “fairly inexpensive to implement.
