The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s AI and data science organisation, has announced it received a renewed grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a goal of helping countries address their digital public infrastructure (DPI) demands.

A secure, private and trustworthy digital public infrastructure is key to enabling residents access public and private services such as healthcare, finance, and social protection.

The project, funded by a £3.14 million ($4m) grant over the next three years, aims to build upon existing efforts of the partnership to establish trustworthy digital infrastructure systems and increase the scope of their work beyond digital identity to include secure and privacy-preserving data exchange, credentialing, and electronic signature mechanisms for paperless and cashless digital economic growth.

Part of the work will focus on uncovering and mitigating risks and threats facing digital infrastructure systems, while also improving methods to enable the secure and private sharing of data with user consent and safeguards.

The work will also focus on developing trust mechanisms to allow digital ID technologies to facilitate cross-border trade and interoperability.

Other areas of focus include increasing knowledge and skills to facilitate the design and development of trustworthy identity systems, as well as supporting countries to understand, evaluate, and mitigate cyber risks in digital systems.

During this period, the researchers will launch a Digital Identity Cyber Threats Observatory which will monitor professional media and forums, vulnerability databases and the dark web to identify emerging cyber threats, risks and incidents that are directly relevant, or closely related to the national digital identity community.

The outputs of this work – led by Professor Carsten Maple, Turing Fellow, and Professor Jon Crowcroft, Special Adviser to the Executive at The Alan Turing Institute – will be disseminated as a digital public good.

“We are excited to continue to work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to deliver trustworthy digital infrastructure that can support the delivery of tangible benefit across the world, but especially to those in low- and middle- income countries that need it most,” Professor Maple said.

The two organisations have already been collaborating for four years with an investment of £4m ($5.1m) to enhance the security and privacy aspects of national scale digital ID infrastrucutre and address the related privacy and security implications, maximising the benefit of this technology for countries across the globe.

Digital IDs can be crucial in an increasingly digital society and every year billions of dollars are being invested to develop more secure, scalable, and user-friendly identity systems.

Many developing countries, however, lack a reliable identification system for their residents, which impacts their ability to access essential services like healthcare, education, finance, and social welfare programmes.

If trustworthy digital public infrastructure is designed and implemented effectively, it can help countries achieve their national priorities and accelerate progress towards their sustainable development goals.

For example, in India, UPI, is a mobile based payment DPI that facilitates interbank, peer-to-peer, and person-to-merchant transactions and services.

It allows government organisations and private companies to use direct transfer to reach 80 million unbanked women, who previously received their salaries in cash. This directly contributes to achieving the gender equality goal through furthering financial inclusion and economic empowerment.

“In the past four years, we have come to share our understanding of trustworthiness in many dimensions of digital identity,” Professor Crowcroft said. “In the next phase of our work, over the course of the next 3 years, we shall extend this understanding to digital infrastructures in general, and to digital public infrastructures in particular.”