Overview
At an ever-accelerating pace, the world is becoming increasingly digital with economic and social opportunities dependent on available digital infrastructure and connectivity. However, this progress is not being shared equally. Many developing countries are falling behind, creating a digital divide that is disadvantaging their ability to fully benefit from global digital progress and participation in the global economy.
In some countries, these challenges require hard infrastructure investment including availability and ability to access broadband internet. In others, lacking adequate digital public infrastructure (DPI), including access to unique digital identification, government to person transfer systems, and data sharing systems impede government’s ability to efficiently provision badly needed services. And in many others, rapidly evolving digital services hold enormous promise for improving the provision of needed services in a wide range of sectors including social protection, financial services, agriculture, health, and education, but are still in initial stages of development and expansion.
Digital development presents enormous potential to affect and improve peoples’ lives in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Yet alongside this potential, this rapidly evolving environment holds risks and unknown challenges as well. The recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence provides just one clear example of how the ubiquity of digital connectivity and services can simultaneously present both. The speed of these developments has created urgency around a learning agenda that can provide evidence on both benefits and potential harms of rapid digitalization.
Themes
In response to these evidence gaps and research needs, the Development Impact group’s digital agenda covers four main pillars:
Accelerating affordable broadband access for all including physical infrastructure and device affordability;
Investing in inclusive and safe digital public infrastructure;
Expanding and improving digitally enhanced services, and;
Harnessing artificial intelligence for communication of evidence and improved measurement.
Partnerships
To pursue these aims, the Development Impact group is partnering with the Digital Development (DD) Global Practice. The DD-Development Impact group collaboration uses a trial-and-adopt approach to measure the impact of their interventions on gender equity, inclusion, digital literacy, trust online, access to government digital services, and socioeconomic well-being. The co-production model also addresses slow implementation by transferring capacity and know-how to local partners, creating a sustainable framework to optimize development impact.
In particular, the Development Impact group is working closely with DD’s Identification for Development (ID4D) and G2Px groups in cross-divisional “DPI-lab”, with a growing portfolio of projects ranging from foundational research and analytical products to ambitious impact evaluations. The team has been involved in assessing Morocco's new digital ID and social registry and setting up communities of practice and research in India and Ethiopia, focusing on access to digital identification and high-value digital ID linked services. Over the last year, the Development Impact group has supported the Digital Global Challenge Program in defining its research agenda and is in discussion with AFE’s Digital MPA to define and launch an initial set of policy-relevant impact evaluations, anticipating Angola and DRC as early moving projects.
The Development Impact group is also launching a new initiative called Impact AI to organize and expand our growing agenda on the responsible use of AI technology in development, built on two pillars: (1) developing AI tools to improve accessibility of impact evaluation research findings for the development community, including our CausalAI product; and (2) designing better interventions by improving the measurement of development outcomes using AI, including public goods to monitor food security globally and online hate content in Nigeria using large language models.
As the Digital Development GP expands and becomes a vice-presidency in the coming year, the Development Impact group’s work and engagement in digital development will become an increasingly important pillar of the Development Impact group’s work.
