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At the Digital Impact Alliance, we prioritize learning at every step of the way.

As countries across the world seek to implement digital and data infrastructure, our priority is understanding – and promoting – how to ensure they bring benefits for people and society. That’s why we emphasize learning in everything we do.  

Every year, as part of our approach to learning, we work with our partners to identify key questions that are holding back progress on digital transformation that improves people’s lives. Our Learning Agenda covers topics related to both our ongoing work and frontier topics with recognized potential. This way, we can ensure we are both deepening our existing knowledge on things like digital public infrastructure and data ecosystems, and providing practical insights to African policymakers, global digital donors, and other relevant decision makers.

The knowledge we glean will not only inform our work going forward, it will also provide important insights into emerging trends, opportunities, and challenges across the digital transformation ecosystem.

Our strategic approach to learning can be characterized by four S’s:
    • Seeking new insights on a range of emerging and frontier topics
    • Synthesizing this information into clear and actionable guidance
    • Socializing our findings among the wider digital development community
    • Sharing at each step of the process

This approach isn’t limited to our Learning Agenda. We follow this model across all of our work.

In 2025, we’ll explore five key topics critical to driving a healthy digital ecosystem.

With focus areas ranging from DPI safeguards to verifiable credentials, our Learning Agenda includes diverse themes and topics. We’ll be sharing our findings later in the year, answering key questions, such as:  

1. How can cross-border data sharing advance Africa’s continental trade agenda? 

The forthcoming Digital Trade Protocol of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) will make it legally binding to all ratifying countries to adhere to policies that harmonize data laws and technology standards. With this imperative accelerating efforts to promote regional and continental integration, there are practical questions of how national governments and regional economic bodies will adapt. Through our ADLI community of practice as well as our partnerships across Africa, we will develop practical insights as to how cross-border data policies and practices can be implemented to maximize the positive impact on job opportunities, economic growth, and information sharing for improving health and other key outcomes.  

2. What are the most effective short-term ways to accelerate the integration of safeguards into DPI? 

Safeguards are needed to ensure DPI provides maximum benefit, while protecting against potential risks or unintended consequences.   Building on the Principles for Digital Development and the UN Safeguards Initiative, we will be looking across our portfolio of work – whether through ADLI, our country engagements, or our on-going inquiry into specific safeguards such as online dispute redressal – to help identify pathways to effective integration. This work will help the DPI community advance safeguards that minimize risks associated with DPI, while at the same time maximizing positive impact on people.  

3. What considerations are key for governments who want to integrate AI and DPI into their digital transformation strategies? 

We will seek to better understand how artificial intelligence (AI) and digital public infrastructure (DPI) can combine to drive economic growth and employment opportunities. We will look at this intersection from different angles, understanding that AI can improve DPI by making digital systems smarter and more efficient, and vice versa: as DPI generates more data relevant to people’s needs, this data can help create AI datasets that are, in turn, more suited to addressing the challenges faced by communities across Africa. For this work, we will draw on our partnerships in Nigeria with CCHub and Data Science Nigeria, as we work to understand what is needed to build a strong ecosystem to accelerate the adoption of AI and DPI.  

4. Which critical enablers of verifiable credentials are needed to allow people to control their own data? 

Verifiable credentials can transform DPI and data sharing by conveying data in a secure and trusted manner, ensuring that people are able to benefit from digital infrastructure by having convenient access to and granular control over their personal data. We will host a Digital Dialogue with key experts in the field to document the current landscape and the multifaceted impacts—beneficial and potentially harmful—that verifiable credential-based approaches may have on individuals, governments, businesses, and economies. Through this consultative process, we will provide practical recommendations for those seeking to understand how to appropriately implement verifiable credentials to solve practical challenges faced by real people.  

5. What links exist between DPI, data, and job creation? 

 Within a few decades, Africa is projected to become the youngest – and most populous – continent. Yet, despite this growth, inequality remains among the highest in the world, largely due to lack of access to meaningful employment opportunities. DPI can spur this much needed job growth, especially when using open standards, software, and protocols. In 2024, we discovered that there is very little data – quantitative or qualitative – to shed light on how DPI and data have created jobs or stimulated entrepreneurship. We will look across our engagements in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and Nigeria while working with partners to understand how we can more systematically track and understand how DPI can be intentionally designed, deployed, and governed to maximize local job creation and accelerate the digital economy.