Digital public goods: understanding the role of generativity in fostering digital innovation for development

This paper examines how digital public goods foster digital innovation. DPGs are understood as open digital technologies designed to contribute to sustainable development goals, which indicates a potential for enabling resource-scarce countries to innovate without the constraints of proprietary technologies. However, little is known about how DPGs foster innovation. We draw on a case study of digital innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic with the software platform, District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2), considered a DPG. We use the concept of generativity to examine how DHIS2’s architecture, governance, and community shaped the case. We found that DHIS2 fostered innovation in a distributed and recursive way. This insight implies that DPGs with generative capacities realize their value through recurring sharing of benefits from their distributed utilization. This research contributes to the ICT4D literature on DPGs by conceptualizing the generativity of DPGs and positioning the study in a digital-for-development paradigm.