This Track focuses on the topic of building Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that is trusted, secure, and inclusive. As DPI systems grow increasingly data-intensive, the risks of data misuse and abuse rise, especially with rapid adoption of AI. The event will cover legal, institutional, and technical safeguards necessary to protect sensitive data, foster accountability, and ensure legitimate use. Participants explore practical solutions for governance, oversight, and international cooperation, emphasizing actionable approaches to authorized use, accountability, and redress in African settings.

This session examines how DPI building blocks can accelerate high-impact digital services across sectors. Drawing on African experience, it promotes a “services-first” approach that prioritizes user journeys, adoption incentives, and measurable outcomes over technology deployment alone. Participants will explore practical strategies for selecting priority use cases, driving integration by service providers, and building institutional coordination models that work. The session also introduces key World Bank tools to support service design, use-case prioritization, and impact measurement.

This session grounds the discussion in real-world country implementations of open source digital identity and civil registration systems. Senior officials share their journeys—from early design and procurement decisions to national-scale deployment and operations. Through practical case studies, the session highlights outcomes achieved, challenges encountered, and the institutional and technical choices that shaped each implementation. Particular attention is given to capacity building, national ownership, ecosystem integration, and managing long-term dependencies. Drawing on experiences with platforms such as MOSIP, DHIS2 and OpenCRVS, the discussion moves beyond success narratives to extract replicable lessons for countries at different stages of their journey.

This session examines how DPI building blocks can accelerate high-impact digital services across sectors. Drawing on African experience, it promotes a “services-first” approach that prioritizes user journeys, adoption incentives, and measurable outcomes over technology deployment alone. Participants will explore practical strategies for selecting priority use cases, driving integration by service providers, and building institutional coordination models that work. The session also introduces key World Bank tools to support service design, use-case prioritization, and impact measurement.

This Track is dedicated to Legal Identity and covers two critical themes. The first focuses on CRVS–ID integration, explored across two sessions (T4-1, T4-2), while the second (T4-3) examines the challenges and solutions related to providing legal identity to refugees and stateless populations.

Building on country experience, this session shifts to the strategic and systemic questions surrounding open source ecosystems. It examines how governments, development partners, and open source stewards must better align to support long-term sustainability, including financing models, governance and stewardship, security and conformance, localization, and procurement approaches that genuinely reward openness. The session culminates in a forward-looking dialogue on digital sovereignty, exploring whether shared principles and coordinated action can position open source as a durable pillar of Africa’s digital public infrastructure.

Open finance is one of the most mature and instructive examples of how identity-enabled, consent-based data sharing can function in a real economy. Because the financial sector is both highly regulated and technologically advanced, it has become a first mover in developing governed data-exchange models that rely on shared standards, enforceable rules, institutional coordination, and verifiable consent. As African countries move toward broader digital public ecosystems, the lessons emerging from open finance provide a practical blueprint for extending trusted data sharing into other sectors such as health, agriculture, and public services. This session examines open finance not as “open-source” technology, but as a structured ecosystem where multiple actors can participate securely under common frameworks. Drawing on African and global experience, it explores the governance arrangements, regulatory roles, consent mechanisms, and technical foundations that enable openness without sacrificing trust. It also highlights the vulnerabilities that open ecosystems introduce and the safeguards required to manage risk at scale.

This session focuses on practical solutions and real-world implementation experience to help countries strengthen the security and resilience of their identity ecosystems. It highlights proven approaches from across Africa, covering PKI deployment, cloud security, and operational practices for protecting critical identity infrastructure. Country presentations and expert dialogue share concrete lessons on governance, system architecture, incident response, biometric protection, and secure credential issuance. The session emphasizes what works in practice, why it works, and how countries can replicate, adapt, and scale these solutions within their own national contexts. It concludes by identifying priority actions and areas for collaboration to ensure continuous protection of digital identity systems across the continent.

As Africa advances toward continent-scale digital trade, cross-border trust is emerging as a foundational enabling rail. Building on the previous session, this segment examines the rapidly evolving requirements for secure cross-border flows—spanning trade, finance, and the associated movement of persons and goods—as anticipated by landmark frameworks such as the AfCFTA, which is expected to drive demand for interoperable digital identity and shared trust mechanisms across jurisdictions. It highlights the policy, legal, and technical implications that identity authorities must anticipate to ensure their systems can support these emerging regional and continental use cases. The session also introduces the growing importance of Legal Entity Identity (LEI) and related enterprise credentials as critical enablers of cross-border transactions, representing a new category of digital identity that many authorities will need to recognize, operationalize, and help govern as part of a broader continent-scale trust architecture.