Open Source DPI: The Real Challenge Is Not to Scale — It’s to Sustain & Build on Top

At the ID4Africa 2026 Open Source Symposium, one framing stood out as the most actionable of the day — and Chris Burt, writing for Biometric Update, captured it with precision: the mismatch between funding cycles and platform lifecycles.

ID and DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) programs run on a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon. World Bank programs run on a five-year cycle. The two are structurally decoupled.

This decoupling has a direct consequence. The sequence that leads to a viable business model — build, sustain, build on top — rarely fits inside a single funding envelope. Countries can manage the build. They can start to scale. Some can even finish scaling. But revenue from services, and therefore sustainability, often arrives just after the loan closes.

With a cohort of programs launched between 2016 and 2020 now reaching the end of their funding cycles, the urgency of building a bridge between CAPEX and OPEX is no longer theoretical. It has become the defining question for the next phase of DPI across Africa and the Global South.

The symposium panel converged on two levers. First, human capacity is the lever that unlocks the others — without local skills, no platform sustains itself. Second, local private sector involvement, brought in early and paid in local currency, is part of the answer rather than an afterthought.

The challenge today is not to scale. It is to sustain and build on top.

Source: Biometric Update

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