ICT4SDG

Digital technology is absolutely critical to accelerate the attainment of the SDG by 2030 and ensure that no one is left behind. Although ICT has been recognized as a strategic, and sector cross-cutting enabler for development, many people around the world are still not benefitting from its transformative power. Despite significant efforts towards ICT enabled solutions for development, stakeholders are often operating and developing solutions in a ‘siloed’ manner, which leads to significant duplication and fragmentation of efforts, and affects resource effectiveness. Maximizing the leverage that digital technology can have on global development requires new ways of cooperation, and pooling of efforts and resources among various stakeholders.

The “Mainstreaming ICT for SDG” project is a collaboration between International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) witch aims to address existing challenges in acheving SDG targets by providing guidance needed to decision makers and donors investing in ICT. The project put fowards solutions for donors and other stakeholders including States and Tech entrepreneurs ​on how to maximize their Return on Investments (RoI) and accelerate progress towards the SDG by adopting a whole-of-government approach.

A whole-of-government approach to ICT investment is required in order to deliver impact at scale, and the SDG provide a strong strategic foundation for digital transformation that is integrated across government both horizontally and vertically. First, the interrelatedness of the SDGs provides opportunity for common approaches and integration within and across institutions, creating an environment primed for systems-level, rather than project-level, thinking. Second, limited resources require a whole-of-government architectural approach that takes advantage of economies of scale that are not available to ICT implemented in a piecemeal fashion. The high cost of institutionalizing ICT solutions dictates that the number of ICT solutions needing to go to scale must be minimized as much as possible. Third, integration is necessary for government programming to reliably deliver end-to-end value to consumers at scale.  

An SDG Digital Investment Framework was developed as an analytical guide to digital investment by identifying reusable ICT building blocks** to deliver priority SDG use cases. At the heart of the methodology is the notion that there are many recurring themes across the SDG targets and that these themes also appear in the use cases that governments are prioritizing to deliver in order to achieve those targets. These use cases can be broken down into common functionality that can be implemented in multiple sectors (via workflows), with each workflow reusing the same underlying software components (called ICT building blocks).

 

** Reusable ICT Building Blocks are technology components that provide an underlying, fundamental function in multiple software applications and systems, designed to be shared and re-purposed for the different use cases. Examples include specific database structures and information architectures, e-commerce platforms, messaging services, geographic information service (GIS), or digital identity management, among others.  ​

​​