Mifos attends Inaugural Caribbean DPI Summit in Jamaica

Mifos was delighted to be invited to participate in the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) summit in Kingston, Jamaica earlier this month.  Our sincere appreciation goes out to the organizers of the summit, Matthew McNaughton & Aura Cifuentes of Co-Develop, for giving Victor Romero and Ed Cable the chance to attend including Ed Cable participation on the panel, Scaling Open-Source Solutions for Public Service Delivery,  and Victor Romero during a workshop on Social Protection.

This inaugural Caribbean DPI Summit held at The University of the West Indies, Mona captured the essence of the first global DPI summit in Cairo but distilled it down into an immersive and intensive intimate experience where we could see firsthand the growing momentum there is across the region yet appreciate the unique challenges and constraints that come with building DPI for small-island nations. It helped to raise both the challenges and opportunities that present themselves at each stage of the implementation life cycle of DPI – Conception and Scoping, Strategy and Design, Development, Deployment, and ongoing Operations and Maintenance.

This event brought together innovators, policymakers, academics, NGOs and advocates to explore how the Caribbean region could harness the power of digital commons to foster economic resilience and social well-being.

In this article Ed Cable and Victor Romero look back over the event and the insights they gained from their perspectives from their relative roles in the Mifos DPI Ecosystem.

A Call to Action: Bold Steps for Regional Progress

It was the first time Victor had attended a DPI summit and he reflects on the energy and power of the event from the start:

The keynote address delivered a powerful message: “If we want to go fast, go alone; if we want to go far, go together” This summit underscored the urgency of adopting digital public goods as tools for bridging gaps in education, healthcare, governance, commerce, justice, financial inclusion, civil rights and climate resilience across the Caribbean.

Speakers highlighted that digital public goods—open-source software, open data, open AI models, and other shared digital resources—are not just technological solutions but catalysts for equitable progress

By embracing these tools, the region can leapfrog traditional barriers to development and position itself as a leader in the global digital economy.

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Remarkable Progress in the Region

Country spotlights from the digital transformation and e-governance teams from the Dominican Republic, Trinidad & Tobago, and host country Jamaica, continued to impress Ed with their remarkable digital transformation efforts. Similar to what was demonstrated by the Philippines at MOSIP Connect in Manila, these countries all have built a robust architecture of foundational digital public infrastructure components centered around ID and data exchange that is propelling them down a journey of rapidly rolling out transformative use cases and solutions for their citizens. Within the region itself, there definitely is still a ripe opportunity for payment solutions to ease cross-border payments and help citizens access digital payments as Jamaica noted its own struggles in multiple failed mobile money implementations over the years. 

Regional Challenges and Opportunities

As Victor identifies the Openness at the event to look at the specifics for the region, both in terms of the Opportunities and the Challenges, is key for the Caribbean but it also has wider relevance across the LAC region.

Participants at the forum discussed the unique challenges faced by the Caribbean, including limited access to cutting-edge technologies, fragmented regulatory frameworks, and insufficient investment in digital infrastructure. However, these challenges were framed as opportunities for innovation and collaboration. For instance, the digitization of public services through DPIs can enhance transparency, improve citizen engagement, and reduce operational costs—a critical step toward building smarter governments

One panelist emphasized the role of digital public goods in addressing climate change, noting their potential to provide real-time data analytics and predictive modeling to mitigate environmental risks (Cadastro Ambiental Rural – CAR System). This aligns with broader efforts to combat climate change using technology and which can be harmonised with other social programs that promote the well-being of the local and small farmers, for example this can be applied to the “Sembrando Vida” in Mexico which has been a success program that is mitigating the migration and the deforestation.

Lessons from Global Initiatives

Attendees learned about best practices from regions like Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Asia and Africa, where conferences on digital public goods have already demonstrated significant impact.

These examples served as a reminder that regional cooperation is key to scaling up digital innovations.

Moreover, the forum celebrated the achievements of innovators who are developing locally relevant digital solutions.

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The Need for Collaboration 

Ed reflects that while leadership from these spotlight countries was on display and regional knowledge sharing and re-use was a key focus of the summit, there seemed to still be an air of skepticism from smaller countries that the larger players would share their innovation. The delicate balance of going faster alone vs going further together was a recurring theme throughout the summit and it was often raised about how to actually achieve better collaboration and sharing of knowledge and innovation at the regional level of CariCom as well as the broader LAC region.

DPGs – it’s not just a Build vs Buy decision.  

The flow of the summit was perfectly orchestrated as immediately after highlighting the need for collaboration, a tangible and practical solution around an ecosystem-based approach to building DPI using DPGs emerged.  Julia Vieira de Andrade Dias Emendabili of Inter-American Development Bank imparted a very powerful message around DPI not being just a binary build vs buy decision but the option of an OSS-based approach using DPGs to build on open source independently or with a vendor to avoid any lock-in. This presentation was eye-opening in helping many countries to discover this DPG-based approach and philosophy, setting the stage for the need to be more aware of the specific DPGs and how they could be re-used and adapted within local country contexts.  

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Given this approach of re-use and adaptation of open source DPGs  to create sovereign self-guided solution is somewhat novel for the region, it reinforced the importance of the ongoing collaboration we have with DPGs in attendance Open Function (OpenFn) andOpenCRVS to demonstrate the art of what’s possible via the rapid deployment of end to end demos of DPG-based solutions through #DaaS tools like Mifos Gazelle.

DaaS – A Deeper Look

The session from CDPI including two DaaS case studies helped to elaborate further on the DaaS concept as not just a technology toolkit but a comprehensive and holistic engagement inclusive of funding as well. Similar to Ed’s observations at the MOSIP Connect event, the need for Gazelle on the supply and demand side was confirmed, and its valuable fit as a key tech toolkit as part of DaaS. While Gazelle in its current form doesn’t aim to support production-level deployments, it helps countries understand the use cases that can be enabled by DPGs by closing the huge gap of time