In the midst of an intense but excellent week at the 2025 Global Digital Public Infrastructure summit in Cape Town, my colleague Lauren Kahn and I helped shape and run a session with a public finance focus. Coming at the end of the conference it was a chance for participants to explore how they might take the ideas and energy from the event and apply it to reforming any/all aspects of public finance: from how we think about tax, to how we ensure compliance, to how public services receive appropriate and timely funding.
Speaking alongside Charis Lee who introduced the Gates Foundation’s perspective and Emily-Rose Steyn who talked about South Africa’s MzansiExchange work to join us financial data, I helped introduce and frame the session, with three points:
- Digital infrastructure governed for the public good is an essential part of modern societies, but it needs to be financed properly and sustainably. That requires us to create both understanding and space in government finances
- The ways that we have approached digitisation of public finance itself has been constrained by the thinking and tools of its time and has tended to lag the latest understanding of how to do digital. What we have today doesn’t often reflect the open, interoperable goals of good digital public infrastructure
- If we want to achieve change we need to think about whole systems, not just the technology in one part of government. For years we’ve been saying “digital’s not just about technology” and we need to live that and also recognise that public finance isn’t just about finance ministries.
Lauren led us through a series of ‘creative tension’ reflections exploring thinking about where to start, balancing compliance and convenience, and many more topics. The room was really engaged and we had a great mix of participants from key thinkers like Fabrizio, Cathal and Devesh through to people from numerous governments around Africa. These conversations have become much richer over the past few years.
I came away thinking about many of the themes my colleague Jessica has since picked up in a great Public Digital blog post on Delivering change across decentralised organisations