UN OSET and UNDP 2024 DPI Safeguards

Citation

Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology (OSET) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The Universal Digital Public Infrastructure Safeguards Framework: A Guide to Building Safe and Inclusive DPI for Societies. Version 1.0. New York: UN OSET and UNDP, September 2024. Licence stated in the guide: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Original: raw/human/universal-dpi-safeguards-framework-v1.0-sept2024.pdf. Markdown copy, made 2026-10-15: raw/human/universal-dpi-safeguards-framework-v1.0-sept2024.md. Publisher’s page: https://www.dpi-safeguards.org/framework. Read 2026-10-15.

⚠️ Contradiction: the licence. The guide says the Framework “is an open public asset shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence” (p. 4, copy line 44). The back page says “Copyright © UN OSET and UNDP 2024. All rights reserved.” (p. 47). CC BY-SA 4.0 may cover “the Framework” and not the whole guide, but the guide does not say so. Quote and cite it freely. Do not copy large parts into the Report until the licence is clear.

Bottom line

• This is a United Nations framework for safe and inclusive digital public infrastructure (DPI). It has 18 principles, 5 life cycle stages, 5 groups of “responsible authorities” and about 300 recommended processes and practices.
• Key principles: F4 (transparency, accountability, no vendor lock-in), O7 (inclusive governance) and O8 (financial viability).
• Its definition of DPI fits CalCompute: “shared digital systems” that give “equitable access to public and / or private services at societal scale”.

Background

OSET and UNDP launched the DPI Safeguards initiative on Sept. 17, 2023 (p. 47). It “engaged 44 DPI experts”, “13 organizations” in an international consultative group, 12 countries and “over 100 contributors” (p. 5).

The guide follows an Interim Report of April 2024. It links to the Global Digital Compact, adopted Sept. 22, 2024. (pp. 4, 9)

Key claims

• DPI is “a set of shared digital systems that should be secure and interoperable, and can be built on open standards and specifications to deliver and provide equitable access to public and / or private services at societal scale”. The quote is the G20 agreed description, 2023. (p. 8)
• Risks to safety: privacy vulnerability, digital insecurity, physical insecurity, lack of recourse. Risks to inclusion: discrimination, unequal access, exclusion, disempowerment. (pp. 12 to 13)
• Structural vulnerabilities: digital distrust, weak rule of law, weak institutions, technical shortcomings, unsustainability. “Vendor lock-in limits flexibility and adaptability to new technologies, leading to long-term costs”. (pp. 14 to 15)
• Life cycle: Conception and Scoping; Strategy and Design; Development; Deployment; Operations and Maintenance. (p. 19)
• Foundational principles F1 to F9, including F3 “Do not exclude”: “All individuals should have a choice of channels (digital/non-digital)”. (pp. 23 to 24)
• F4: “DPI should be developed with democratic participation, have public oversight, promote fair market competition and avoid vendor lock-in. All partnerships should be transparent, accountable and publicly governed.” (p. 23)
• F9: “mitigating the environmental impact with a net-zero strategy or minimizing resource needs with reuse of software.” (p. 24)
• O7: governance “should promote transparent and participatory multi-stakeholder governance focused on safety and inclusion.” (p. 25)
• O8: “Governments can lead during the build phase and local digital partners or the private sector can lead on operations and maintenance.” (p. 25)
• O9: “DPI should share and reuse open protocols, specifications, Digital Public Goods (DPGs), and the associated knowledge.” (p. 25)
• Governance actions table: governance standards, oversight mechanisms, capacity-building and equitable development, each with design, implement and monitor steps. (Table 3.1, p. 36)
• Annex 4 suggests key performance indicators (KPIs) under People, Redressal, Institutions and Processes, Laws and Policies, Market Dynamics and Technology. (pp. 44 to 45)

Evidence and method

Expert working groups, consultations and country engagements (p. 9). The guide gives principles and examples, not measured results. It says “there are no comprehensive tools to measure the effectiveness and impact of DPI” (p. 35).

Limits

• Written for national DPI such as identity, payments and data exchange. It does not discuss compute platforms.
• Most recommendations sit in an online “interactive knowledge library”, not in this guide. That library is not in raw/.
• The back page says the views “do necessarily represent those of the United Nations”. A word (“not”) is probably missing.

⚠️ Contradiction: the guide says it describes “13 interrelated risks” (p. 5). Section 2.1 lists 13. But Annex 5 indexes “RS1–RS4”, “RI1–RI14” and “SV1–SV5”, which is 23 codes (p. 46).

⚠️ Contradiction: the executive summary calls the group the “International Organizations Consulting Group (IOCG)” (p. 5). Annex 3 calls it the “International Organizations Consultative Group” (p. 43).