IGF 2025 - Day 3 - Studio N - Networking Session #37 Mapping the DPI stakeholders

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for joining us here in the room and for those online. My name is Emrys Schoemaker. And today, we're going to have a session looking at Mapping the Stakeholders around DPI.

And I come from an organisation called Caribou Digital and we do a lot of work conducting research, providing support to organisations looking at implementing, understanding digital public infrastructure.

And I'm joined today by a really great panel who will be bring a variety of perspectives to the question of what it means to approach mapping and thinking about DPI, and the different stakeholders that are involved in it. I'm going to start just by saying a few words about why we're convening this panel and why we're convening it here at the IGF.

Firstly, to introduce the term, I'm sure many of you are aware but in case not, DPI stands for digital public infrastructure, and digital public infrastructure is a term that's increasingly used to think about and approach how countries go through a pathway of digital transformation.

Its origins are in the work that India particularly led in developing a digital identity infrastructure but also now includes thinking about digital payments and also data exchange, as well as a variety of other core, critical digital elements that are necessary to enable digital economies, to enable digital society and digital government to actually function and grow and enable innovation.

It's a growing term and increasingly adopted not just in the global majority world but also in other parts of the world, as well.

Europe, for example, describes its approach to DPI. So there's a very growing adoption and way of thinking about how we build these core infrastructure elements of what it means to have a digital world that is delivering value for everybody.

And this is a core part of what we mean by DPI, digital public infrastructure, but it delivers public value for public interest, that this is really about ensuring that the various needs that societies have are met through these digital structures.

But bringing a public approach to thinking about digital infrastructure necessarily means there's a variety of stakeholders who are involved.

Government, of course, in terms of deploying, leading, shaping how those different infrastructures are developed.

Private sector, vendors, the providers of these different technology pieces and those are both traditional private sector industry players, as well as emerging players that offer open-source software, as well.

And finally, of course, civil society actors who represent a diversity of interests, whose needs are critical in the process of designing, deploying and managing DPI in order to ensure that the interests of everybody are represented in those processes.

So, mapping those stakeholders becomes critically important if we're to ensure that everybody supports the vision for a digital transformation, that everybody supports the destination that that journey is leading towards.

And so, we're doing work right now to really learn from how do you map?

How do you understand the different stakeholders that are necessary for this kind of process? And how can you enable those different stakeholders to work together, to cooperate, to ensure that a digital transformation journey, a DPI deployment is fully supported, aged with and meeting the needs of all members, all stakeholders that are in a society?

So, we're conducting this research. This panel is an opportunity for us to really learn from experts. So I'm really excited to have this conversation today.

It's also an opportunity for us to learn from you, the wider IGF community so after this panel we invite you to stay for an informal discussion about what we can learn from you that the IGF community has really learned in terms of how do you manage multistakeholder processes?

As we go through the panel, we're going to have an online element, as well, so we'll be inviting both you in the room, as well as the audience online to respond to questions we'll share on screen, as well.

And I would like to acknowledge the support of Codevelop who have been supportive of the research, as well as enabling this panel to come together, as well, and we're grateful to Krisstina Rau who wasn't able to be here in person but is going to be keeping the online fires burning and making sure that that process happens smoothly so thank you, Christina.

So, we have three fantastic panellists.

We have Chinthaka Ekanayake from Sri Lanka; we have Max Kintz from the digital public goods alliance and Susan Mwape from Common Cause in Zambia.

And these individuals have such deep insight into what it means to think about stakeholders from a government perspective, from a vendor supplier perspective, as well as from a civil society perspective.

And, of course, you in the room have deep expertise and insight, as well that we're really looking forward to learning from.

I'm going to turn first to Chinthaka. And Chinthaka, you've been deeply involved leading Sri Lanka's journey towards the development and deployment of digital transformation for a long time and your work engages with a variety of different stakeholders. It's been an opportunity and a challenge, I think, in terms of how that works.

But from your experience, from a government perspective, what do you see as the primary stakeholders that are important as you navigate that process? And how have you been able to engage with them? And there should be online, there is, to the audience, it would be interesting to hear which stakeholders are important? And which strategies are important in member states' engagement?

But Chinthaka, to you first.

>> CHINTHAKA EKANAYAKE: Thank you. Firstly I extend my sincere gratitude to the United Nations, as well as the Internet Governance Forum for providing this opportunity. I also extend my special thanks to the secretariat who facilitated my participation in this event.

To answer your questions, based on my past 22 years, on digital transformation in Sri Lanka, as well as a couple of other countries, I would say it can vary depending on the initiative you are going to implement.

And there will be internal and external stakeholders based on your projects and initiatives, as I mentioned, but mainly, we can categorize stakeholders, because I work for the government. So the government stakeholders mainly who are the policy makers, regulators, implementing agencies, local and regional bodies and also, the technical partners, open-source foundation, such as MOSIP, and technology defenders, like AWS and Microsoft also, and then cybersecurity experts.

The development partners and donors I'm very closely working with the Gates Foundation, World Bank, ADB, and some of the bilateral donors, G2G engagement.

Of course, the civil society and advocacy groups in the private sector, telecom providers and startups.

And importantly, end users, citizens, who are the community leaders, grassroots organisation citizens, they are very important.

The strategy, what we mainly approach, in government priorities, we have hundreds of government initiatives, and then we choose high impact use cases, and then map these priorities with the potential stakeholders who can support what they can support and when they can support.

For example, funding technical support for capacity building. Also, the training. This approach allows you to reach and map and track stakeholders, their activities, more effectively. This is my experience.

By implementing this method, we showed some significant improvement in the stakeholders' engagement and collaboration. And also, the clear mapping of the priorities and facilitated target interventions, resulting in better allocation of the resources, because it's like basically, I would say you can optimize the grants and resources and enhance collaboration with the main stakeholders. This structured approach streamlines our process and also contributes to achieving our goals.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you, Chinthaka. And I'm really struck by the complexity of the stakeholder landscape that you described, and I think it's -- we often forget that certainly within government, it's not a monolith. And we often think the government, that's the government, that's the private sector, that's civil society. And what you described, I think, is the complexity of both internal and external stakeholders.

And internally, I think what I hear in what you say, one of the challenges of a DPI approach is if you have shared infrastructure that's shared across different departments, that's a big change in the way these different stakeholders within government have to work together.

And I think that's a really important thing for us to remember as we think about how to enable those processes to work well, and the politics of that. It's not always easy.

Stepping outside of government, Max, you work a lot with organisations and people who are developing software and products and tools that are used within a DPI journey. What's your perspective on the role of tech providers, and the kind of ways in which they might engage with the DPI journey that countries go on?

>> So let me start by first thanking you for the kind invitation and the opportunity to speak to you on this very important topic. And indeed, we are working with a lot of tech providers and tech providers intervene at various different levels on digital public infrastructure, be it by providing open standards, consulting, providing the very code and software and even the brick-and-mortar infrastructure. There's a multiplicity of different layers at which we can have suppliers intervene. DPI is complex. It's big.

So traditionally, there's governments or large IT companies that have been involved in that, but we have recently seen I would say a wave of open source and digital public goods space consortia as providers of these solutions. And I would like to start by enumerating key characteristics here. They're open, they're reusable, adaptable, they champion principles like interoperability, privacy by design, inclusiveness, and what's very important to you as well is they very often are designed for emerging economies or by stakeholders in these economies. These consortia entertain various different roles in the provision of DPI, be that in the actual platform development, in the ecosystem collaboration, in the maintenance of those products. And according to our data, approximately 70 countries globally are implementing DPGs as part of their core digital identity, digital payment or data exchange layers.

Now, they hold great potential, but there's also a couple of challenges that I want to speak about.

First of all, we need to speak about funding volatility in that context.

So, a lot of those vendors are dependent on philanthropic and grant money to execute their products, and therefore, they are subject to shifts in the interests of those stakeholders.

So how do we insulate those vendors who are working on those critical infrastructural components from those exchanges? That's a very important topic.

Secondly, the second challenge I want to speak about is the commercial viability of those modular, interoperable open solutions. And I want to be precise here. We're not only talking about open source in that context, because many companies have been thriving on the basis of open source, to drive business success. So it's not about open source. It's really, the question here really is about how we can safeguard the public interest, the publicness of that solution by a commercially viable, sustainable model.

So how can we make sure that those companies contain the core code basis of those solutions and allow others to work on them?

And lastly, and that also connects a bit to the idea of stakeholders, it's also important to talk about the visibility of the impact of those solutions. And while it's very easy to deploy those solutions at speed, most of those vendors don't know where their code is deployed, for what purposes, what it costs and how it's being done, and that's a huge challenge, if you are looking for funding and measuring impact.

So, I think this resumes well the challenges that there are. There's a couple of practices I want to speak about, that I want to say are emerging practices that point to the right direction.

First of all, on the countryside, we've increasingly seen countries take co-ownership, co-funding of those products. And I want to point, for instance, to the example of Cambodia, via their Universal Access Fund has been funding a critical layer of the DPI based on that.

It will be important to talk about the role of procurement in that context, so fostering open-source first principles in procurement is an important aspect to create a level playing field between DPGs and private sector companies.

And lastly, let me mention also, it's not necessarily about building for but building with an approach. Fostering partnerships, creating synergies with your vendor ecosystems is a very important and crucial aspect in making those solutions sustainable and operationalizable, and a primary example here is the HIST network, the ecosystem and network that is maintaining one of the largest health platforms globally.

And so in a nutshell, digital public goods have a great potential to enable transfers, open-source digital public infrastructure, but we need to address a couple of structural challenges in order to make that happen, and it's really about moving from a build and deploy mindset to a build your own and maintain mindset that's built on an ecosystem approach, and that's why I think this discussion about mappings is particularly important.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you, Max. And I'm particularly struck by your emphasis on two points: The importance of making sure that the components that an infrastructure is built out of maintains the public nature of that, the public interest and public value and so forth on the one hand and open source is a critical part of that, but as you said it's beyond open source.

And on the other, the business model around which productions the are developed, maintained. And I think what you described that you're seeing in terms of emerging opportunities perhaps in terms of the role that government procurement can play in terms of investing in providing that sustainability for these critical components, I think, is really important to take notice in terms of what that means for suppliers, for vendors and their relationship with government in order that when governments do buy services and systems, that they're actually thinking about some of these questions, as well as the interests of some of those stakeholders. That's a really helpful reminder.

Thank you. And now Susan, turning to you, you had deep experience in how actors outside of government, the P in DPI if you would like, the public, how do you see that working? And we know that in some contexts, the deployment of DPI has been challenging, that there have been tensions between different stakeholders that in some cases people feel their needs have not been heard or listened to, incorporated into some of those processes. I would be interested to hear your take on how do you navigate that? What does civil society need in order to be at the table, in order to ensure that their needs and interests are represented so that the P in DPI is really realized?

>> SUSAN MWAPE: Thank you very much for that question. And indeed, it's quite challenging, but I think there are four main factors that create these challenges. There's the issue of power, there's the issue of influence, priorities and also just the technical capacity. DPI is quite complex.

Civil society has got so many facets to it, so when you say civil society, it all represents different interests so getting them all under one agenda for DPI can also be a problem.

But I think that if we have to navigate that, we have to look at inclusion of civil society, and that is inclusion by design. Oftentimes, we find that a process like DPI functions from a top-down approach and so civil society is brought to the table much too late in the process, to the extent that it becomes a bit of a challenge for them to find their way into this process. And in raising a number of issues, especially those that speak around issues of rights, privacy, and all those issues, it becomes a tug of war.

So, DPI by design means all these issues and concerns could already be taken on board.

So instead of treating civil society as an agenda item, this is a term I learned from the youth at the IGF, instead of treating civil society as an agenda item of DPI, it's important to look at them as strategic partners.

And then the issue of influence in the design process needs to be taken with a lot of seriousness, so that when consultations are made, participation of civil society isn't tokenistic, but more strategic, and that's where we all begin to add value to the process. The issue of capacity and resource constraints -- and I think this is something that Max was talking about earlier, just having the capacity and civil society having that technical expertise creates a disconnect.

So sometimes, you find that the conversations around DPI become redundant, because we are lacking that technical know-how.

We also have the issue of bad laws.

I think that policies and laws that exist are also creating a bigger barrier in the grand scheme of things, and so you find that governments are also trying to protect themselves from one thing or the other using bad laws, and civil society has to constantly do all this pushback around that.

And I think my last point would be definitely misalignment priorities, where government priorities focus more around issues of efficiency. One of the buzzwords of DPI is scalability, economic empowerment, those issues, and then you find that on the other end, civil society talks more about inclusion, about rights, about community needs and that's a real gap.

Beyond all these issues, trust is the biggest factor. And when we talk about trust, you find that civil society's distrust for civil society, especially in cases where you find that the government has in the past or has a history of exclusion, issues of surveillance, data misuse and all of that, there's a lot of suspicion on the end of civil society.

But at the same time, government also views civil society as obstructive, and also overly critical, because the concerns they have, government is oftentimes looking at the bigger picture in terms of security. And when you talk about security, security will not give you so much space to talk about surveillance and all of that.

There's a need to address that and also the timing of engagement.

I think I already talked about this where civil society comes into the story too late. We need to involve civil society.

There's also the issue of the DPI safeguards. We have DPI safeguards. And I think that's an opportunity for civil society to progress and also to add value to the DPI conversation. Popularising the DPI safeguards would help to address a lot of misinformation that exists around this. It will allow for, I think, more stakeholders to come on board and coming from civil society, it changes the narration, from a very technical conversation to one that is more transparent, a DPI that's more inclusive, rights respecting and also one that all stakeholders can embrace.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you, Susan. I want to pick up on your reference to the DPI safeguards. I think that's an important one. I wonder if you could tell those who may not know what the DPI safeguards initiative is, because it's an important part of thinking about a multistakeholder approach to ensuring that the public interest element of digital public infrastructure is realized.

>> SUSAN MWAPE: Absolutely. And with the DPI safeguards, the idea is for more multistakeholder-ism and having more players participate in the process, making the process very transparent, open, and inclusive. And so even a model like the IGF, which brings on board so many stakeholders, it's a multistakeholder platform. You can see from -- this is my third IGF, and I noticed that from coming to the IGF, you get an opportunity to engage with people you oftentimes would not be able to meet.

If you just walk in the corridors during the tea break, lunch, you'll hear a buzz of conversation and a lot going on, because those platforms are important.

For those of us that come from very restrictive environments, you'll find that it's easier to meet your minister here, you're able to talk to them and tell them your concerns. You meet a policy maker. You meet your internet service providers and all these different stakeholders are able to listen to one another in the same way that we are having this information. We have Max on the tech side.

We have Chinthaka who's also on the governance side and so this gives us an opportunity to have broad conversations that we can draw lessons from and also input constructively into.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: And that's great, Susan. Thank you. I think the DPI safeguards work is a really useful example of how the digital public infrastructure community is trying to learn from other spaces like, as you said, the IGF and so on.

I'm particularly struck in your description generally of how important it is to understand different stakeholders' interests and priorities, the goals that different actors might be pursuing, as you said.

There might be an efficiency goal, or it might be a security goal, and those have different implications in terms of how open some stakeholders might be to interacting. And I'm also struck by the importances that you put on recognizing that digital public infrastructure exists within an ecosystem, which includes things like laws and regulations, and you might have the perfect tech system, but without the right laws and regulations in place, there can still be issues and so on. So I think that's a really helpful reminder of that.

I want to open it up a little bit. We're really keen to have and to learn from, and to hear from others in the room.

And so one question, this is particularly to civil society organisations or people with experiences, how do you wish governments did multistakeholder engagement differently?

Is there anybody here in the room who would like to respond to that, to engage?

Please. And please feel free to speak. There's also a microphone on the side if that's easier.

(off microphone).

Thank you for making the trek over. Let me thank Susan whose journey here was long and arduous, much like civil societies' experience of engaging in various forms of consultation so thank you for that.

>> AUDIENCE: Okay. My name is Vivian. I work at the Media Foundation for West Africa. We are based in Ghana, but working across West Africa.

We work on digital rights and freedom of expression and other things.

But I really want to speak about -- we have a project called the Digital Public Infrastructure Fellowship, which we've been running in West Africa. We are currently focused on Ghana, Nigeria, Benin and Togo. We see that governments don't do a lot of consultation when it comes to DPI development and deployment, because there are some cross-cutting issues that affect how these policies are implementing and how people use these policies.

One of it is digital literacy.

One of it is issues about access which affects people's use of, for example, instant payment systems. There are people that cannot access instant payment platforms, because one, they don't know how to use these platforms. They also don't, you know -- they are not digitally literate. And we find that the media is a very key stakeholder in ensuring that the issues of people are brought to the fore, particularly marginalised communities and basically, they are keeping an eye on how these policies are implemented.

For example, in Ghana, Nigeria, there are issues about the national identity system.

People register for ID cards, they don't receive them, and these ID cards are tied to so many things, opening a bank account, getting SIM cards, and other services, including using mobile money, which is very popular now for instant payments.

So I think there has to be a lot of consultation by governments, not just designing the policies and starting implementation. Sometimes, we find that a lot of these initiatives are a result of push by the donor community or the World bank brings fundings, you need to get a national ID card for empower people so they start implementation right away without consultation. When it comes to some of our countries in the global majority, a lot of people listen to the imams, their religious leaders. They listen to traditional leaders.

If a chief says do not go out to register, people will not go.

And so we find that it's very important for governments to ensure that there's a lot of consultation. Across many stakeholders, getting people to really understand these policies and why it's important for them to be deployed and also ensure that the implementation is human rights respecting, because, for example, in Nigeria, so many people are registered for their ID cards, and they don't have a fiscal ID. They just have a number, and a printout. In Ghana, for the ID cards, they ended up not receiving them, and these people are excluded from banking services, from getting SIM cards and all of that.

I mean not to continue blabbing, but it's very key that governments ensure that there's a lot of stakeholder engagement in the development, in the deployment. Thank you.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you so much, and I think so much in what you said, but particularly the reference to the importance of the media as a stakeholder, as an actor who plays a role in making sure that wider discussion around these processes is engaged with, is understood, is absolutely critical.

I would like us also to make sure we've got space for people online. I do see your hand up, and I'm going to invite Nandifa, with your hand up online, if you're able to join.

>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I hope I'm audible?

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: We can hear you.

>> Okay. Thank you. One of the issues I had wanted to raise in the context of DPI is that probably we might have -- adding on to what the last contributor has just said, we need to look at what the industry does in terms of the -- what they call the licence to operate.

Now within the licence to operate paradigm, there are clear guidelines on how you engage stakeholders at the grassroots because within extractive industries, you need to make sure that there's functionality where that particular capability is, and also for security.

And so I believe that we have other sectors that we need to look into.

And I sense that when we do that, we will see the interdependence between internet governance and mapping, and the energy that's provided for within extractive industries.

That's my input and thank you for allowing South Africa and West Africa to participate.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you so much for that. I think that's a useful contribution and thank you for joining us, at least virtually.

We have another question here in the room and then at the front. Please go ahead.

Yes.

And then people online can also hear you.

>> AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. Thank you so much to the panellists, the public is very important, essential to internet governance. I'm based in Geneva in Austria.

My question is how could we give more trust, how could we draw more trust between the civil societies and the governments in decision making?

I'm saying to say I'm a member of a current working group on data governance adapted by the UNCOTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Science and Technology Department.

But mostly, if we announce these kinds of working groups, people are kind of reluctant, both diplomats, government officials, and civil societies.

So what can we do to really motivate and have more trust in this kind of work? Thank you so much.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you for that question, and I'll turn to my panellists, perhaps Chinthaka first. I'm eager to hear your thoughts on how, from a government perspective, that question of trust can be engaged with.

>> CHINTHAKA EKANAYAKE: Let me share my experience. I think the gentleman mentioned his very valuable question, that building trust is important.

So currently in Sri Lanka, we are in the process of implementing digital ID project. There's a lot of barriers.

We work with a lot of challenges. But I know it's because I'm from the technical background, I know it's technically possible but building the trust with the people is another concept.

So what we propose is basically, we come with the communication plan. So we address the technology, we address something like more awareness, and then we are going to build the experience centre, digital ID experience centre, people can see a real experience.

And then they need to have more association with the grassroots level and academia, the different people and then different level of people, I think that will be more effective.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you for that. Susan, perhaps from your perspective, what would help build that trust between civil society and government?

>> SUSAN MWAPE: I think that openness would be one thing. And also having constructive dialogue, transparency in the process, because I think that is one of the greatest gaps that governments have. Oftentimes, they are of the view that citizens don't know what they want, but the people do know what they want and when given an opportunity, they will state exactly what they want.

Whenever there's openness and transparency in a process, it builds trust in itself, but when you have processes that start from the top down to the bottom, and are just pushed on people, they often get the pushback, but that step in itself opens the process up to what would I say?

It seems like misinformation. It's easy for people or opposition parties that are strong in places to politicize a process.

And I think that Vivian gave a great example when she talked about issues of digital literacy, for instance. We are talking about DPI, but, first of all, look at countries like mine, Zambia, where digital literacy is very low, internet penetration is very low, the cost of data is very low.

So at the end of the day when you look at the landscape in itself, to what extent would DPI add value, especially to marginalised communities?

And so in terms of answering the question of building trust, we need transparency, we need openness, we need to collaborate. Civil society can also be destructive at times, if we're being very honest and so I think it's very important for civil society to also engage in constructive dialogue. Collaborating with government and undertaking constructive dialogue doesn't mean you have to lose your lens. In the end, you maintain your accountability lens and still play that role, that additional eye that ensures that these decisions we're making are rights respecting, that they add value to our communities, and the people we serve.

And also understanding that government is there to serve our interests, and we can work collectively.

Thank you. I hope that answers your question.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you for that, Susan. And Max, from a tech supplier's perspective, what do you see as the importance of trust and what role can tech providers play in that? I'm just wondering particularly in things like the opening of open source, transparency and so on in the systems themselves?

>> Absolutely. This is a very crucial topic, because without trust, there's not going to be any implementation of these topics, because we rely on people to trust those technologies.

What's very important about DPI and DPGs, I think, is that they are not only in the words, in the law, but they very crucially exist through these technologies, so for us, it's important to give everyone the opportunity to have a look at the technology, have those solutions be transparent, available to be reused as well, and I think that's a crucial component of increasing trust towards those technologies.

Of course, there are technical barriers, and that's why for governance to be able to buy what they want, own what they buy and eventually, also reshare what they own, we need to invest also in the digital literacy of societies to be able to really make use of the potential that open source and DPI really offers to them.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you, Max. And we have another question from the floor, please.

I'm also mindful of time from our wonderful production team.

Two or three hours to go still.

That's great, thank you.

>> AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm from DHS. I have a question for all the panellists but it's specific to Sri Lanka so maybe Chinthaka can talk about that, but others, as well.

It's more about not just mapping the correct stakeholders to promote DPI, but it's about the way we engage with them.

So the thing is when we try to promote DPIs, we show access as the main value proposition.

But in the context of some of the countries, for example, Sri Lanka, they have been having national ID for a very long time, for decades. That's one thing. And you can't really find any person in the country who doesn't have a bank account.

So if that kind of a context, when you try to promote this DPI, the digital public infrastructure, you might kind of find it a bit challenging just to show that okay, we are kind of having digital payments and digital ID.

So to kind of a community which already enjoyed some of the benefits of ID and banks, so probably that maybe one reason why promoting digital payments have been not a success so far in the last couple of years.

We have been trying, but I don't know about the adoption.

So my question is like, how much contextualising do we do when we are promoting DPI across different countries? Specifically when it comes to the context of Sri Lanka who already enjoyed the benefits of having ID and having bank accounts for so many years?

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: I think that's for you.

>> CHINTHAKA EKANAYAKE: Thanks. I think the barriers you have mentioned promoting the DPIs, the barriers we have is people work in silos, and there's some bureaucracy, and then personal interest and then from the vendors maybe.

So of course yeah, we are trying to do the digital ID project for many years. Now at least we are in the ending stage.

So what exactly we did to promote the DPIs and luckily, they are leaders, they are from the tech background, and they are very keen to implement the DPI.

We are doing in different ways, especially to providing some awareness and training from the different levels.

For example, from the ministries, industries, and the operational levels for the engineers as well as in the civil society, as mentioned here.

And then building trust again is a key.

So, we have different networks.

The other thing is like purchasing the open-source formula, we need -- the policies need to be embedded in the government procurement. Probably, I think, from Sri Lanka in the next two or three years, we will try to change the policies. It's not easy. We need to get approval from the parliament. That is my thought.

Thank you very much.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you, Chinthaka. And I wonder if there's any comments on that from other panellists, and then we'll have to close, I think, because we are already over time and abusing our kind production team's generosity.

>> Well, I cannot speak to the specifics of Sri Lanka, of course, but I will be able to speak to the importance of localization and the importance of adaptability when it comes to the implementation of DPI.

There are no one size fits all solutions in the space and especially when it comes to convincing your citizens. I think it's important to start from where they are. And therefore, it's important that we throw the one size fits all solutions on them but start from where they are and also, the technical development path of a particular country and really make sure that we design specific development pathways around that initial starting point.

And once again, I'm just going to make some shameless promotions for open source, because as you know, we know each other pretty well, open-source solutions and DPGs provide an excellent opportunity to adapt, working around local knowledge and local abilities, and really go from there.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Susan.

>> SUSAN MWAPE: I was in Sri Lanka two weeks ago, so I have a soft spot. But I won't speak to Sri Lanka. I think that particularly speaking of digital ID systems, I think one of those innovations that have brought a lot of issues, and I can think of a number of countries going through challenges where we've seen civil society actively engaged in these processes. Recently, we had a case where the Kenyan civil society sued the government on the Huduma Namba, which was excluding a lot of communities, and the Nubian rights forum was one of those organisations that pushed that a lot.

There are the issues of South Africa with the post-apartheid ID. There's so much, I think, to learn from so many countries on what the digital ID has come up with, but there's also so many great examples to learn from, and so I guess it's about finding the balance and being very attentive to that and ensuring that all voices are heard in these processes.

And as they are being developed, they do not now begin to create a gap and exclusion in the process.

>> EMRYS SCHOEMAKER: Thank you, Susan. I fear we're really out of time, and I know there's also questions we have not been able to get to from audience members online, so apologies for that, but we do promise to stay in touch. If you would like to reach out to us, please, please do.

I would like to thank my panellists for making it, difficult journeys, for bringing insight and expertise to the conversation.

Obviously, also to audience members for being part of the conversation.

I did say at the beginning that we really hope to continue this conversation. We're going to stay here. I'm going to stay here, and I would love to continue the discussion for those of us who are able to be here in the room and as I said, this is a piece of work, a process of consultation to understand how stakeholder engagement can be best supported within DPI processes.

So, any insight, anything you would like to share will be gratefully received by us.

Please don't hesitate to follow up with us.

But I would like to thank again panellists, the Internet Governance secretariat for helping make this space available and, of course, to our wonderful production team for ensuring that all voices are heard today.

So, thank you all so much and round of applause for our panellists.

[Applause]