Digital Sovereignty & Open-Source: The Unlikely Duo Shaping DPI

Reflections and insights into the value of open-source data exchange infrastructure and the conditions needed to enable it.

The global digital development landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. As we navigate the mid-2020s, a shift towards national digital sovereignty is fundamentally redefining how countries approach technology, data, and international cooperation. This pivot, particularly evident in 2025, carries significant implications for sustainable development in the global majority countries, including the evolution of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and the role of open-source solutions.

The Accelerating Pivot Towards Digital Sovereignty in 2025

2025 has emerged as a pivotal moment in global geopolitics. In the West, the established liberal paradigm of global governance, which has underpinned sustainable development efforts for at least twenty-five years, has evaporated. A renewed era of realpolitik is emerging to fill the void left over, with Western countries pulling back from multilateralism, free trade, aid, and the projection of soft power. 

In the digital policy sphere, one way in which this new reality is manifesting is as a push towards digital sovereignty by governments and political blocs worldwide. 

In the European Union (EU), the State of the Digital Decade 2025 report explicitly calls for EU and Member State action on digital transformation and digital sovereignty. Its recommendations span crucial policy and tech stack areas, including advanced connectivity, semiconductors, secure and sovereign cloud infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and cybersecurity. 

The trend is equally strong across Africa. For instance, the African Union’s (AU) Malabo Convention on Cyber Security and Data Protection (2023) and its Continental AI Strategy (2025) both advocate for sovereign data management and AI capabilities, aiming to promote African countries’ control over modern data sources and technology. Moreover, key events in 2025, including the Global AI Summit on Africa in Rwanda and the 2nd Conference on the State of Artificial Intelligence in Africa in Nairobi, have focused on the critical need for digital sovereignty alongside inclusive development tailored for the continent, emphasizing control over critical infrastructure, including digital infrastructure.

In the United States, in February 2025, the Trump administration issued a memorandum authorizing trade tariffs against companies deemed to be “hindering American companies’ global competitiveness”. This move was a direct response to the administration’s belief that European regulations and fines on US tech firms violated “American sovereignty” and compromised “American economic and national security interests.” This ongoing “tussle and negotiation” over tech firm regulation underscores the broader global trend toward greater exertion of sovereignty over digital infrastructure.

This global pivot signifies a fundamental realignment, where national control and self-determination over digital assets and infrastructure are becoming paramount modes through which sovereignty is asserted. 

Digital Sovereignty and Open-Source

In our view, as Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG), one of the most compelling characteristics of the recent shift towards digital sovereignty, particularly from a digital development perspective, is the heightened emphasis on open source solutions as crucial enablers of digital sovereignty and political agency. 

Perhaps counterintuitively, open source has become a technical cornerstone of digital sovereignty. This is largely because the use of open source technologies largely frees users from dependency on others. In short, open source technology allows for a greater degree of independent control over digital infrastructure.

Beyond political endorsements, renewed enthusiasm for open source is evident in various initiatives, for instance, within the EU’s Gaia-X project, which is developing open source cloud and data infrastructure. Denmark has gone even further, actively exploring replacing governmental reliance on proprietary solutions like Microsoft’s Windows and Office suite with open source alternatives like Linux and LibreOffice to assert digital sovereignty over civil servants’ daily digital tools. We anticipate that in the near future, more countries will translate political statements in support of digital sovereignty into operational reality through the use of open source technology stacks.

This transition to open source, while promising for sovereignty, is not without its complexities, especially when considered through a development lens. Moving from a proprietary solution to an open-source alternative has significant implications across various operational aspects: maintenance, cybersecurity protocols, data integration strategies, governance frameworks, management practices, staff capacity requirements, and the broader tech stack. How governments will approach these issues will significantly impact how successful they ultimately are at “exerting sovereignty” over their digital infrastructure. There is a real risk that poorly thought-through or incomplete approaches to adopting open source will leave critical components of national tech stacks either dependent on external providers or vulnerable to cyberattack.

Data Exchange: The Interoperable Core of Open-Sourced DPI

The current shift towards digital sovereignty will have a significant trickle-down impact on national DPI policies. With open source technologies being prioritized to achieve digital sovereignty, there will need to be a corresponding focus on developing DPI using these open, transparent, and controllable solutions. 

As open-source approaches in DPI development and implementation pick up pace, the criticality of data exchanges to the functioning of digital goods and services will also increase. Data exchange, in its simplest form, refers to the process of transferring or sharing data across institutions, systems, platforms, or even individuals. It is recognized as a core pillar of DPI, with organizations like GovStack and the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) particularly emphasizing its importance in the context of open-source solutions. Data exchange is essential for linking digital identity or e-payment services to specific e-services – from pensions to agricultural subsidies – and any other financial interaction between administrative authorities and individuals.

Achieving effective data exchange as part of their DPI investments presents pressing challenges for governments transitioning to open-source systems. At its heart, data exchange is a complex series of interoperability challenges spanning technological, data, organizational, and human layers. Many government offices struggle with siloed, sector-specific digital systems that impede effective data utilization and decision-making, thereby hindering ambitious sustainable development goals. 

To ensure that DPI successfully meets public needs in this new era of digital sovereignty, unlocking interoperability in data exchanges will be crucial. This is essential for ensuring that the datasets powering digital services, evidence-based decision-making, and public transparency are standardized, adhere to critical protocols, and are semantically interoperable (i.e., that machines can read the data in a manner that preserves its meaning and integrity, ensuring it is fit for purpose). 

As governments move towards integrating open-source solutions into their DPI, they need to be mindful of the technical capacity, cost, and operational needs that accompany this shift. They also need to ensure that they do not over-focus on e-payments and digital ID systems as pillars of DPI to the detriment of data exchanges, which in open-source systems are arguably the cornerstone of DPI.

Operationalizing Digital Sovereignty for Resilient Systems

In 2025, digital sovereignty and open source have become an unlikely duo. From the point of view of governments, the operationalization of digital sovereignty through open source technologies creates opportunities for more resilient data and digital systems, including DPI, to be built. 

As this trend accelerates, the function of data exchanges in establishing interoperability between open-source systems is ever more important. Based on our decades of experience building open source digital infrastructure at DG, for governments adopting the open source approach to digital sovereignty, several insights and recommendations stand out:

• Governments must examine existing data governance policies and practices to proactively prevent unexpected blockers when implementing open source solutions, particularly within broader digital transformation strategies.
• It is essential to understand what already exists at a technical level to effectively set priorities. Rather than discarding functional systems, the focus should be on connecting existing systems through new data exchange infrastructure, such as creating data standards or semantic interoperability layers. This approach necessitates creating data standards and identifying champions who can advocate for and develop these standards across sectors and regions, recognizing that this is a time-consuming process.
• Institutionalizing sustainability from the outset is paramount. Data exchange infrastructure initiatives must integrate human, institutional, financial, and technical components to ensure long-term scalability and viability.
• Finally, there’s a need to build data exchange capabilities now for future innovation. Investing in open source data exchange creates a stronger foundation for implementing innovative technologies, particularly AI, which relies heavily on vast amounts of data. This also necessitates fostering institutional and individual digital literacy, as well as robust data organization and categorization.

In the coming decade, DPI development in the global majority countries is likely to be characterized by a balance between procuring off-the-shelf solutions from diverse markets (including the US, EU, China, and others) and deploying locally developed or supported open source solutions. The increasing focus on data exchange as the central cog of open-sourced DPI will necessitate continuous updates to digital transformation policies, strategies, and open source tools to meet these evolving needs. This path forward requires a careful balance between practical implementation and the political realities of 2025.