Making digital public infrastructure work for women and girls: Exemplar stories

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) is increasingly widespread, enabling financial inclusion and access to essential services. Efforts to harness it to advance progress on Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality, however, remain in the early stages.

Recognizing this gap, this publication highlights efforts to develop gender-inclusive DPI that can be replicated and scaled up. However, for DPI to enable society-wide capabilities and access to essential services, it must respond to everyone’s needs, including those of women and girls.

Building on the DPI Safeguards Framework, the publication highlights how DPI design must recognize women’s experiences across the entire life cycle, from birth registration to support in older years.

Governments, regulators, donors, technology providers, and civil society advocates need to proactively consider this life cycle and how the key components of digital ID, payment, and data exchange systems can deliver real benefits safely and equitably at every stage.

The report contains three recommendations:

1. Invest at scale in gender-inclusive DPI to address challenges faced by women and girls.
2. Design and build DPI with and by women and girls from the start, and include their perspectives throughout the cycle of design, development, deployment, reflection, and review.
3. Collect gender-disaggregated data on the impact of DPI, including outcomes related to awareness, access, and use.