Digital public infrastructure, productive investment, and institutional reform as the coordinated levers to compress the global poverty curve — toward a universal reasonable standard of living.
Despite decades of global economic expansion, poverty reduction has stalled. Growth concentrated in a few economic hubs — enclave growth — fails to raise living standards at the required scale and speed.
The UN's SDG Goal 1 target of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 is off track. At current trajectories, hundreds of millions remain below $2.15/day well into mid-century. A different model is required — one that prioritizes the diffusion of productivity, not just its generation.
Core insight: Poverty reduction at scale requires productivity diffusion — the broad, inclusive spread of high-productivity jobs, capabilities, and essential services — not hub-concentrated GDP growth.
GDP concentrated in elite hubs. Peripheral populations disconnected. Inequality compounds.
Productivity spreads across firms and households. Inclusive growth compresses poverty broadly.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is not a sector — it is horizontal infrastructure that lowers transaction costs across all sectors simultaneously.
When designed as interoperable public rails with credible governance, DPI enables governments to deliver targeted transfers with less leakage, helps small firms build verifiable credit histories, and reduces the informal fees that disproportionately burden poor households.
The critical distinction: DPI must be governed as a public good — open standards, interoperability, and privacy protections — not fragmented into siloed platforms that create monopolistic rent extraction.
Interoperability prevents platform lock-in. No single private actor should own the rails.
User consent frameworks and data minimization protect rights while enabling access.
Regulatory oversight and accountability mechanisms build public trust and adoption.
Offline channels and grievance mechanisms ensure DPI reaches excluded populations.
Productivity diffusion accelerates when the cost of participating in markets falls for households and small firms — and when firms can reliably access critical inputs at scale. These five infrastructure platforms are the recurring levers.
The five platform pillars apply universally, but the binding constraint — the bottleneck limiting the next advance in broad-based productivity — differs by region. Policy sequencing must identify and relieve the next constraint first.
Early investments must reduce economy-wide frictions and build state capability. Once platforms are reliable, private investment and innovation compound the gains. Sequencing is not optional — it is the mechanism.
Coordinated reforms across the five platform pillars — sequenced by binding constraint — can compress the global poverty curve significantly below business-as-usual trajectories. Three phases bring poverty to near-elimination by century's end.
Digital connectivity, financial inclusion, logistics efficiency. Gradual decline as diffusion extends from core centers outward.
Governance capacity, formal employment expansion, infrastructure reliability. Acceleration phase as systems reach critical mass.
Integrated services, resilient institutions, inclusive market deepening. Sustained low poverty as systems become universally dispersed.
Every development pathway faces structural risks that, if unaddressed, can undermine platform investments and reverse poverty gains. Each risk has a corresponding design response built into the framework.
Manufacturing peaks at lower income than historical precedent. Countries lose productive complexity before workers are absorbed.
Explicit tradables and competitiveness strategy. Avoid policy incoherence that taxes exporters or raises input costs for manufacturing.
DPI delivers most value as interoperable public rails. Siloed projects create redundancy, lock-in, and exclusion.
Mandate interoperability from the outset. Govern DPI as public infrastructure, not a collection of private platforms with API bridges.
Large capital projects without credible fiscal capacity create debt overhangs that crowd out essential maintenance and service delivery.
Prioritise high-return maintenance and institutional reforms first. Sequence major infrastructure projects around demonstrated fiscal capacity.
Climate events and conflict can erase decades of poverty gains in months. Hard-won development is fragile without resilience investment.
Adaptive social protection systems, energy grid redundancy, urban water infrastructure. Build resilience as a core feature, not an add-on.
Digital systems that assume literacy, connectivity, and device access will systematically exclude the most vulnerable populations they aim to serve.
Pair digital channels with offline alternatives. Grievance mechanisms, assisted access points, and rights protections must be built in from the start.
Measurable progress requires a clear scorecard across four domains. These indicators track whether platform investments are translating into broad-based poverty reduction.