Robert Opp is the Chief Digital Officer of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations’ global sustainable development organization. He leads the agency’s digital transformation, an organization-wide effort, to accelerate achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure no one is left behind. Under his leadership, UNDP’s Digital, AI and Innovation Hub supports more than 120 countries in building open, inclusive and rights-based digital ecosystems. It also brings expertise, insights and lessons from the country-level to inform global digital policy, to ensure that technologies, including digital public infrastructure and artificial intelligence accelerate sustainable development. Opp additionally leads UNDP’s own internal digital transformation effort. Prior to this role, he served as Director of the Innovation and Change Management Division within the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) where he established an in-house ‘Zero Hunger’ innovation accelerator and created an award-winning crowdfunding smartphone app, ShareTheMeal. Opp recently spoke to The Innovator about closing the global technology equity gap.
Q: You last spoke to The Innovator five years ago. How has the UNDP’s strategy evolved since then?
RO: When I came on board in late 2019 as Chief Digital Officerit was to lead UNDP’s digital transformation and we were getting these ad hoc requests for support coming from countries. And then in March 2020 COVID hit and there was a big shift. There was this realization that you can’t sprinkle a little technology or innovation on something and it’ll make it magically better. Now we get fewer requests from countries for support on specific solutions. What’s on their mind currently is how to build their digital infrastructure going forward.
Q: How are you meeting that demand?
RO: We have developed a way of supporting countries with three very interlocking pillars: technology foundations, digital policies and strategies, and digital capacity building. The first pillar is around implementing technology foundations and the things needed to build the digital infrastructure. But we also support them with what must accompany that: the kinds of policies, strategies and enabling environment that is able to support the use of that technology, safely, inclusively while respecting human rights and dealing with capacity issues. No country has sufficient digital capacity, and so they’re all looking for how to build capacity among civil servants and across virtually every sector. So, our work has really shifted more around that and on digital public infrastructure.
Q: What do you mean by digital public infrastructure?
RO: It’s the digital equivalent of physical roads and railroads and bridges. Governments or the private sector might build it but then it is used by businesses and individuals for things like digital identity, digital payment systems, open data exchanges across society, the sort of platforms that invite the private sector to participate and innovate on top of them. This is a space that we’ve really become very keen on. We are collecting lessons and working with partners like the World Bank on this. It is also the topic of a new World Economic Forum Global Future Council that I am participating in.
What we have found is that what makes digital public infrastructure most effective is when government establishes the parameters around very transversal platforms like digital ID not just from a technical perspective but also covering things like inclusion and safety. The effective systems out there are the ones that invite the private sector to tap into those transversal platforms and use it to build businesses. A great example of that is India, with the building of the India stack, which includes the Aadhaar digital ID system, the UPI digital payment system, and others. Essentially, these serve as platforms that individual businesses or entrepreneurs can use and tie into them to build new businesses and new business models because they’re open and interoperable by definition and by design. So, when it comes to digital public infrastructure, that’s a really interesting kind of ecosystem play that involves inviting the private sector to play an important role.
Q: Along with the equity gap there is more and more talk about digital sovereignty and rejection of being dependent on just a couple of Big Tech companies for AI products and services. How do you see that movement evolving and what is UNDP’s take?
RO: When we talk to countries about building their digital public infrastructure, what we are advocating for is not a particular technology. We try to present countries with choices, the tradeoffs and the lessons learned from other countries and best practices. With all the buzz around AI and the introduction of services like ChatGPT we are getting more questions about which AI do I use? How do I get the compute power and collect and clean the data?. What are the policies and strategies I need to guide AI and what are the capacities I need to make sure I can use AI? We see it as a major equity gap that’s growing between the countries that are well advanced and able to pay for investment and capacity and those that simply aren’t.
As a development organization, what we want to advise them on is what’s the strategy to take to ensure your whole population is included and that you’re building toward your national development and not just an asymmetrical kind of economic development. When it comes to AI, there are currently challenge areas. One of them is the availability of accurate and representative data that feeds the data sets. You need good data to train these systems so that they can solve local challenges and local problems effectively. And that is usually missing, because the main data sets, the most complete data sets in the world, are those based on the Internet and predominantly in English. We also need to support countries to address the shortage of digital capacity. How are they changing their higher education policies, their overall education policies, to feed the future pipeline of innovators and talent? And then there’s the area around compute which is very asymmetrical. Currently only 2% of the world’s data centers are in Africa. We asked a group of AI innovators in the developing world if they have the compute power that they need and only 5% said they do. And so we’ve been looking at what would it take to foster private sector partnerships between global companies and African companies to make this more available and make it more affordable so that people can access compute.
What we look at is how to ensure that countries, particularly least developed countries, that have less ability to afford investment in these spaces, can participate in being creators of AI and not just consumers of AI built elsewhere. We don’t take a position on what the global market should do. We are just saying however the technology evolves, we need to make sure the equity gap is closing and not widening. There is also a better understanding now, I think, of the need to mitigate risks from technology and the potential risks that are there. One of them is leaving people behind. We’ve put forward a view around how to implement and support countries with technology and do that in a way that supports human rights and ensures inclusion for all. Because it is quite easy to take a policy decision or a technology decision that goes down a certain path, and then you realize that certain segments of your population have been left out.
Q: What do you consider to be the biggest challenge in your job right now?
RO: There are both external and internal challenges. Our mission is to close the connectivity gap globally. There is an exponential pace of technology development and so our big challenge is how do we help countries everywhere try to keep up or participate in a way that really supports their development and doesn’t leave them behind. That’s probably the biggest external challenge. We also see externally and internally, a lot of duplication of effort which I think is somewhat natural, especially in the innovation space, where a lot of similar ideas pop up. But, for every innovator, the biggest challenge is always scaling. And so how do we move beyond the exciting little experiments all over the world and get into really scaled, proven solutions that are really moving the needle on some of the development challenges?
Internally our biggest challenge is funding. There are massive tectonic shifts impacting the aid community right now, driven by policy changes across various countries. So our challenge becomes how can we help countries with these massive changes related to rapid evolution of technology when at the same time, our own budgets are shrinking?
Q: How long do you think it will take to tap into AI’s full potential for solving the Sustainable Development Goals?
RO: We take an optimistic view of the tremendous potential that AI can have on things, such as helping a small farmer learn an entirely different way of farming, with real-time feedback on his or her crops, supporting an SME that needs to market products do it in completely different languages without needing to learn those languages, or even introducing one-to-one tutoring for kids that have don’t have any teachers. We are seeing exponential growth in these types of benefits but I am not sure that we’ll see exponential growth in the countries where we work, unless we really see change in the investment patterns and more partnership with private companies. We need to create the right sort of environment and put the right policies and strategies in place to make ecosystems in the Global South attractive so that they can start to take advantage of the AI dividend.
Q:What would you like readers to take away from this interview?
RO: If the Global South had the kinds of capacity and compute power it needs it would create new business opportunities. At a time of great geopolitical uncertainty and exponential change, businesses are struggling with how to prepare for the future. If both tech companies and corporations had the foresight to make the necessary investments and partnerships in the Global South now, they would reap the dividends down the road. Closing the global technology equity gap would not only benefit people and planet it would also significantly expand the global consumer market.
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