Participating in the Digital Inclusion Summit recently organised by Capacitate reinforced an important conviction for me: as South Africa advances its digital transformation, we must ensure that people remain at the centre of the systems we design.
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) offers significant opportunities to make services more accessible, enable trusted transactions and connect citizens to education, employment and other opportunities. But technology alone cannot deliver inclusion.
Digital infrastructure enables the transaction. Human infrastructure enables participation.
Human infrastructure includes the people, capabilities, relationships and trusted institutions that enable citizens to navigate increasingly digital environments. In South Africa, libraries, schools, colleges, clinics, community centres, NGOs and public servants can become important bridges between digital infrastructure and the people it is intended to serve.
These institutions can also help people develop digital capabilities, access learning, understand their credentials and navigate pathways into further education and employment. Human infrastructure is therefore not peripheral to DPI. It is essential to making DPI inclusive.
Moving beyond access to agency
For me, agency must become one of the central measures of inclusive digital transformation.
In the context of DPI, I understand agency as people’s ability to understand, access and use digital systems with sufficient capability, confidence, choice and control to act in their own interests and pursue opportunities that matter to them.
Consider education and work. A South African may have a formal qualification, workplace experience, a short-course credential and skills developed through other forms of learning. Yet this learning may sit across different institutions and systems, and some of it may not be easily visible or trusted by another education institution or employer.
Digitalisation alone does not solve that problem.
This thinking also informs my work on the Digital Credential Exchange (DCX), where we are exploring how trusted, verifiable credentials can connect learning acquired across institutions, workplaces and other settings to opportunities for further learning and employment.
The objective is not simply to digitise credentials, but to strengthen people’s ability to use evidence of their learning and capabilities to navigate their own pathways.
The same principle applies across digital public services. A person may technically be able to access a system but lack affordable data, digital confidence or an understanding of how their information will be used. The infrastructure exists, but their ability to act remains constrained.
The important question is ultimately not simply, “Can I access the system?” but rather, “What am I able to do because this system exists?”
Inclusion must be designed into the system
This question is particularly important in South Africa, where people encounter digital transformation from very different starting points. Connectivity, devices, affordability, literacy, language, disability, geography and digital confidence can all determine whether a service that is technically available is genuinely accessible.
The risk is that we digitise existing inequalities rather than reduce them.
Digital inclusion therefore cannot be addressed after the technology has been built. It needs to be embedded in the architecture, governance and implementation of DPI from the beginning.
This is also a question of collective responsibility. Government has a central responsibility for inclusive public service delivery, but business, educational institutions, civil society and communities all have important roles in building the human capabilities and trusted relationships needed for meaningful participation.
South Africa’s emerging digital public infrastructure presents an opportunity to bring these efforts together rather than perpetuate fragmentation.
The challenge now is to make agency more than a principle. It needs to become an observable outcome of digital transformation.
Ultimately, the success of digital public infrastructure should be measured not only by the systems we build or the transactions we enable, but by what people are empowered to do because those systems exist.
