UNICEF Ventures, in collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development and Cooperation (Norad), is hosting an unconference on December 15 and 16, 2018 to kick-off the creation of a platform for Digital Public Goods.   In the late ‘90’s, UNICEF and other agencies worked to create an alliance for vaccine procurement.  This pooled financing mechanism became GAVI, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year partnership that spans government, private sector, and development and procures and delivers vaccines globally, fairly, and at scale.  We want to do the same for information and information products, for digital goods, for megabytes, and the content that they can hold.

The platform could enable governments/organisations in any country to identify and deploy packages of digital goods (for example, Wikipedia, MOSIP, U-Report, Project Connect, or the Global Digital Library). It will be easy to add to / extend / and build on.   

But – we don’t know how to build it. So, we want to work through issues, problems, and opportunities we’ll face.

More on Digital Public Goods… 

There is a now a global consensus that digital technologies have the potential to create tremendous opportunities to accelerate sustainable development. However, at the moment, there are deep inequalities in access to technology and digital products, the lack of which further deepens inequalities. A concerted effort to make technology and digital goods for the public good easily discoverable, accessible, usable and customizable will enable the attainment of the SDGs by 2030. The ‘GAVI for Digital Technologies’ is the foundation of this effort. The proposed platform for Digital Public Goods (DPG), will understand the demand for DPG, negotiate favourable terms of access to DPG, and develop a financial mechanism to ensure continuing access, especially by developing countries, to much-needed information and other publicly useful digital goods. It will help identify where the useful digital goods are, where there is a lack, move kilobytes to the lacking areas, develop a financial mechanism to create and buy useful kilobytes, and shape the digital industry to ensure fairness and equality in the ecosystem.

Think of it like  “github for good” with physical distribution and a better interface and some money behind it.  This project is funded (jointly by UNICEF Ventures+NORAD) for 6 months.