Despite global advancements in digital infrastructure, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to face systemic barriers to effective data sharing. These challenges span technical, legal, organisational, and cultural domains, often perpetuating inequities in access to data-driven opportunities. Drawing on recent case studies and empirical research, this analysis synthesises the evidence on persisting obstacles and emerging strategies that exemplify the DPI approach for overcoming them.
As the global conversation around Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) gains momentum, it is reshaping how countries approach digital transformation. DPI promises to offer a broader framework for building secure, interoperable and inclusive ecosystems. But for LMICs to meaningfully benefit, persistent challenges around infrastructure, legal frameworks, and user rights must be urgently addressed.
Recent analyses reveal that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to face systemic data-sharing barriers, with 72% of sub-Saharan African nations reporting worsened interoperability gaps since 2020 due to fragmented digitalisation efforts. The health sector provides valuable evidence of how this challenge plays out on the ground in LMICs.
Concerns around the compatibility of legal rights, terms and conditions governing data from multiple sources— enabling users to combine, share, and reuse such data without violating legal obligations or compromising the rights of any data source— can be significant blockers to effective data sharing. As with other digital systems, poor infrastructure, unreliable internet connectivity, power shortages, software crashes, and unsuitable data management solutions contribute to data fragmentation and format issues.
The absence of a standardised methodology has been highlighted as an issue for metrics such as loan coverage and volume of outstanding debt in efforts to reconcile public sector debt data, critical for informed and sustainable borrowing decisions. Intellectual property disputes further complicate cross-border collaborations. The 2007 H5N1 avian influenza crisis exposed tensions when Indonesia withheld viral sequences over concerns that high-income countries (HICs) would develop unaffordable vaccines from shared samples. Even within countries, subnational policy misalignment creates bottlenecks. LMICs struggle with inconsistent data classification systems across ministries, hindering interagency collaboration and the use of administrative data by their own statistics agencies.
At a broader level, as the potential for data reuse grows rapidly, existing user consent mechanisms are proving ineffective. Consent is usually presented as a non-negotiable, “take it or leave it” option— typically delivered through lengthy and complex privacy policies that most people cannot understand. Current consent regimes suffer from both cognitive limitations (users cannot process or understand complex notices) and structural problems (such as consent fatigue and power imbalances). Consent often functions as a mere formality, enabling data-driven business models rather than protecting user autonomy.
This underscores the need for user-centric design in DPI, where people are empowered to control their data in ways that are simple, meaningful, and aligned with their interests.
Learnings and emerging solutions
The GDPR plays a central role in shaping global data privacy and protection regimes, and its underlying principles are widely accepted. However, implementing the framework poses challenges, particularly for LMIC governments facing significant resource constraints. This makes it essential for countries to develop their own approaches to regulating personal data, aligned with local priorities, needs, and capacities.
Public sector data sharing has evolved significantly over the past few decades, most recently through the open data movement, predominantly in developed countries where data infrastructure and institutional maturity were already in place. Meanwhile, extractive data collection practices, a lack of contextual innovation and coordination mechanisms, and the reinforcement of existing structural inequalities remain key barriers that must be addressed in emerging models of data exchange.
The DPI approach represents a re-thinking of how foundational digital systems that encompass technology, markets, and governance can be designed and deployed for scale, impact and safety. Reducing barriers to data sharing through interoperability is a key feature of DPI, with ‘safety by design’ and ‘safety by contract’ combining to enable responsible sharing of data among stakeholders. Many global efforts to reimagine, implement and scale data exchange have shown promise and require further examination.
Success stories of DPI
With half a billion end users across 25 countries participating in its data exchange implementations, Estonia’s X-Road provides a model that can be resilient, safe and effective for the public sector to adopt. Its application to cross-border use cases and attempts at Nordic interoperability, along with its digital public good nature, are valuable as international data flows become a key aspect of regional cooperation.
Mauritius has developed a data-sharing ecosystem and fostered a strong innovation environment for businesses and entrepreneurs through the InfoHighway programme. Beyond the digital platform, implementing data protection legislation and open data policies, establishing both central strategic and distributed operational capacities, and investing in sector-specific solutions were all necessary to make the data exchange ecosystem effective and meaningful.
In India, by the end of 2024, 120 million accounts had been linked, and 570 regulated financial entities were participating in the account aggregator ecosystem, an industry-driven open finance experiment. Trust and convenience in the ecosystem are leading to increased willingness to share data, which ensures users retain control over the extent and duration of data sharing.
The DPI approach offers a promising path for addressing persistent data sharing challenges. By focusing on interoperability, governance, and user control, it creates ecosystems where data can flow securely for maximum societal benefit. Successful implementations across diverse contexts show that with the right architecture, we can unlock data’s full potential for both public and private sectors, while ensuring LMICs are not left behind in the digital transformation.
This article is part of a series produced in collaboration with the International Centre for Tax and Development at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK, exploring the role of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in strengthening state capacity and fostering development. We welcome contributions to this series.